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 thing we can say about ourselves, and then we say it about everybody: "all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags." Whatever good thing you have done, the thinking goes, that is all it was worth.
But 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." This whole chapter is a prayer prayed from inside a ruin, by people who know exactly why it happened. It opens by asking God to tear open the sky: "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down."
Set that beside the way the line is used now. Today it is treated as a flat statement about human nature in general, about anyone at all. In Isaiah it is a nation confessing its own record while standing in the wreckage. The "we" is the people praying, speaking about themselves, and the "righteousnesses" are their own record of keeping the covenant. One verse earlier, the same prayer says that God meets a certain kind of person: "Thou meetest him that rejoiceth and worketh righteousness." A prayer that knew of no goodness God accepts could not have said that.
The picture itself is of a stained, soiled cloth, the kind of garment the law of Moses counted unclean. That is the force of the Hebrew, and the confession behind it is plain: when a whole people has turned away from God, even their religious best is soiled by it.
Lord, tear open the heavens and come down, because what we manage on our own 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 the same as repenting, and it is cheaper and quicker than repenting. So we pray what this prayer says two verses later: "But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter." Take the clay into Your hands, and make something of us that is fit for You to meet. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 330 is Commit Your Way (Psalm 37:5).