Isaiah 64:1–9
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! (Isaiah 64:1)
Most people think abolition is a fantastical idea—they always have. Abolitionists who wanted to end slavery in the United States heard again and again about how disruptive it would be. Those who sought to abolish Jim Crow, lynching, and discrimination at the ballot box heard again and again about how unsettling it would be. Today, calls for the abolition of police and prisons hear the same thing—it’s too troublesome, unruly, and even destructive! Abolition is an impossible consideration because it would upend everything.
Yet, when we come to Isaiah this week the opposite impulse is on full display. The writer invites the tumult!
“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!”
“The mountains would quake at your presence!”
“The nations might tremble!”
Like much of the prophetic writings, here God is disruptive, unsettling, and troublesome. Instead of shying away from a wild, liberating God, the writer clings to the very things opponents of abolition fear. The writer knows that what some call disruptive and troublesome is actually freedom, justice, and deliverance.
The season of Advent compels us toward this vision of God. Mark’s Gospel this week begs us to keep awake and stay alert for God’s arrival, and Isaiah unflinchingly depicts the advent of God as something that upends the earth.
This upending will not be comfortable, as the writer of Isaiah suggests. God’s arrival unmasks our sins, revealing that “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” Commitment to abolitionism likewise draws us to consider our iniquities. To challenge systems of incarceration and policing demands that we confront the prejudice, malevolence, and evil within ourselves that invented and props up these institutions. To advocate for abolition is to challenge national myths of freedom and greatness, instead pointing to the original sins of this nation.
But the disruption is good news! The writer of Isaiah reminds us that God can make a new thing in us. “We are the clay, and you [God] are the potter; we are the work of your hand.” God can make a new world among us—one that sees as its foundation mutual care, neighborly affection, and shared abundance instead of surveillance, punishment, and violence. If abolition is a fantastical idea, it is no more fantastical than the God we claim to serve.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina. You can find more of his work at wespearsnewsome.com.