From Isaiah:
A highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Holy Way;
the unclean shall not travel on it,
but it shall be for God's people;
no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
What a simultaneously puzzling and hopeful passage. The idea that Israel would have public works projects, a kind of pre-Roman interstate, is interesting, and it's probably even more interesting if it's not a literal highway that runs to Tel Aviv. More particularly, a few words in it offer odd and fascinating windows on our faith.
What do we do with this mention of the unclean, those not allowed on it? This doesn't sound like a very Jesus-y claim, as he seemed rather fond of opening the holy to the unclean as well as recently showered. But of course this is Isaiah, not Jesus. He seems to be envisioning a road without traffic.
After all, imagine if we bumped all the unclean people off the road we commute on, whatever our means of commute. How wonderful it would be to have the road/train car/sidewalk to ourselves! To have all those whose driving we mock in popular jokes removed, which would include: low-riders, beat-up pickups with confederate flags, old people generally, young people generally, all soccer moms, business people on cell phones, and of course, women. Finally! A pure road, clean of bad driving! <--That's a fairly ambiguous picture, one that simultaneously shows us our petty intolerance and captures the feeling of free travel. We can imagine what that kind of driving would be like, but hopefully we might all recognize how it shows us our own bigoted selves, selves which come out almost exquisitely when we drive. Perhaps, in other words, Isaiah is exactly like us--and we should recognize the feeling Isaiah is speaking of, that of unencumbered travel, and also recognize the good old sinful humanity that, like us, imagines success at the expense of those who are different from us.
But more interesting to me is the passage closer to the end: no one, not even fools, shall go astray. I find this to be one of the most optimistic pictures of life offered in all of Scripture. How wide, exactly, would a road have to be so that no one would go astray? Exactly how large are the guard rails? And even more: 'fool' turns up in a few strategic places in the psalms, namely, where it reads: "The fool says in his heart that there is no god." Could this passage be speaking of that same fool? Can God craft a road so large that even the most foolish, those who don't believe in the road they're walking on, can still reach home?
Whether that sort of reference is a legitimate one here, I am uncertain, but I find it intriguing. I think a more helpful way to approach the verse is to notice that once someone has gotten on the way, no matter how foolish, they won't go astray. What this might mean for Christians engaging in radically different cultures, learning about other faiths, to me seems fairly obvious.
But more interesting to me would be if we could seriously ponder what this might mean for how we treat each other. In our own era, to disagree is to cut relationship. It happens with news channels, among families, and in friendships. A few stand the test of serious disagreement, but these days, most relationships ignore disagreement or break it off--witness, for example, the divorce rate, which is caused by many things (a confusion about what marriage is for, inter alia), but surely also by the confusion of agreement with relationship. In other words: when we think someone's acting like a fool, we stop being their friend.
But how might we look differently if we saw that not even fools can go astray? If nothing so foolish can happen that it severs relationship? How could we respond to others if we saw their foolishness as only one moment in a whole lifetime of walk along the Holy Way?
