A Covenant to the People

Extract

A sermon preached at the Judges Service held at Portsmouth Anglican Cathedral on Candlemas Day 1986, in the presence of the Lord Chancellor and attended by judges, magistrates and members of the legal profession.

Says the prophet:

I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations. (Isaiah 42:6)

How, though, did the man who first summoned Israel to this vocation understand her mission?

Ironically, he was writing at a time when the very future of Israel’s identity as a people was most in jeopardy. Forty years before she had suffered humiliating defeat by the Babylonians. Her temple was destroyed and her leaders, together with the king, exiled in heathen Babylon. The first prophet of the exile, Ezekiel, had assured his fellow captives that if they remained faithful to their God they would be restored to their land. But nothing had happened and, as the generation which had gone into exile died off, it seemed that God had totally abandoned his people.

Then suddenly a second prophet sounded his triumphant message: Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that her warfare is ended,

that her iniquity is pardoned. (Is. 40 : 1—2))

But he was not just content to proclaim Israel’s return to her land: he saw her as the agent by whom the whole world would be brought under God’s rule. Her restoration was not just to vindicate God’s people, to allow them fellowship with him irrespective of what went on elsewhere in his world. Rather it was to be a light to the nations.