Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 330 · November 26
Filthy Rags
“But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.”
We reach for this verse when we want the harshest available thing to say about ourselves, and then we say it about everybody. All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Whatever you did that was good, that is what it was worth.
Look at who is speaking and when. Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised thee, is burned up with fire. Zion is a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation. The whole chapter is a prayer prayed out of a ruin by people who know exactly why the ruin happened, and it opens by asking God to tear the sky: Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down.
Set that beside the way the line travels now, as a flat statement about human nature in general, about anyone. In Isaiah it is a nation confessing its own record while standing in the wreckage of it. The we is the speaker, about the speaker, and the righteousnesses are that nation's covenant performance. One verse earlier the same prayer says God meets somebody: Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness. A prayer that knew of no righteousness God accepts could not have said that.
The image is a used cloth, and versions divide on how far to press it. Of the ten on this device, five print filthy rags, three a polluted garment, one a filthy garment, and one is blunter than any of them. The confession holds in all ten and never depended on the strongest of them.
Rend the heavens and come down, because what we manage alone is exactly what Isaiah described. You know what our best week is made of. We have been quoting this verse at ourselves as though saying the worst thing were repentance, and it is cheaper and it is quicker. Do what the prayer asks two verses later. Be the potter, take the clay in your hands, and make something of us that is fit to be met. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 330 is Commit Your Way (Psalm 37:5).