23rd Sunday A

The book of Isaiah as it is called in the Bible, is an extensive edited collection of writings that are drawn from at least three different time periods. Using the division of chapters and verses introduced in the 13 th and 16 th centuries, the first 39 chapters are from the earliest period when the prophet Isaiah lived, namely the last half of the 8 th century BC. From this section our first reading ( Isaiah 2:1-5 ) expresses in its own way the vision of the glorious future that it was believed God had planned for His creation. The significant political situation at this time is that Judah and its capital city Jerusalem were under threat from other nations. Isaiah, as a court prophet, must have been aware of this as well as of the religious situation. His religious belief was that God (that is to say their god) had chosen them to be the greatest nation of all, expressed at this time as the expectation that Jerusalem would eventually be the focus for all the nations. And so the visionary poem that is our text, is an expression of hope that all the nations will submit to the Law (in the first section of the bible) and together rejoice under Jerusalem’s supremacy in the worship of God. The climax of the vision is that there will be peace among all nations expressed poetically as “turning swords into ploughs and spears into pruning hooks.”