The coal that touches unclean lips

Isaiah dates his vision with care: “In the year that King Uzziah died.” Uzziah had reigned over Judah for fifty-two years — nearly the only king most living people could remember. He had been strong, then proud, then struck with leprosy, shut away until he died. The throne everyone trusted was suddenly empty, and the nation that leaned on it felt the ground tilt.

In that year, Isaiah walks into the temple and sees the throne that was never empty. “I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted; and the train of His robe filled the temple.” Above Him stand the seraphim — the word means the burning ones — and they cannot look directly at Him. With two wings they cover their faces, with two they cover their feet, and only with the last two do they fly. The unfallen creatures nearest God shield their eyes. And they call to one another the word that will echo through the rest of the book: Holy, holy, holy.

What happens to Isaiah next is the honest thing. He does not feel inspired. He feels exposed. “Woe is me, for I am ruined.” The Hebrew is the cry of someone coming undone at the seams. He has spent his life speaking — he is a prophet, a man of words — and the first thing he notices in the light of that holiness is his own mouth: “I am a man of unclean lips.” Standing where the burning ones cover their faces, Isaiah discovers he has nothing to cover his with.

There is a particular kind of dread that comes with a mirror in honest light. You have caught your reflection a hundred times in dim glass and thought yourself fine. Then someone turns on the overhead light at a dressing-room counter, or you see a photograph taken without warning, and there it all is — every line you had been editing out, the face you actually wear when you are not arranging it.

A friend of mine avoided the dentist for years. Not from pain — from being told. He knew, in the back of his mind, what the X-ray would show, and not knowing felt safer than knowing. The light that would name the trouble was the light he kept dodging.

This is why most of us keep the holiness of God at a comfortable distance. We will take God as encouragement, as comfort, as the warm sense that things will be all right. What we instinctively avoid is the full light — the throne, the burning ones, the word said three times — because some part of us knows that to see God clearly is to see ourselves clearly, and we are not sure we can survive the look. Isaiah did not survive it, exactly. He came apart. “Woe is me, for I am ruined.” But the story does not end where his ruin begins.

A prophet in Jerusalem who began his ministry around 740 BC, the year King Uzziah died, and served through the reigns of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah while Assyria threatened to swallow Judah. His vision of the Lord enthroned (chapter 6) marks his call, and his favorite name for God — “the Holy One of Israel” — runs through the whole book. He saw both the holiness that ruins the unclean and the salvation that comes down to them: a child born, a Branch from Jesse’s stump, a feast where death is swallowed up.