A Devotional Life
Isaiah 52:7-10
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news,
who announces salvation,
who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."
(Isaiah 52:7)
This passage is one of the better known verses from Isaiah. In it is a simple image of feet delivering Good News. Clearly the feet are a metonym (a metonym is a rhetorical device in which part of the whole represents the whole. For example, we might speak of a king's rule by saying, "The crown decrees that...." In this example, the crown - worn on the king's head - represents the whole king). It is not just the feet that are praised, but the whole person who brings Good News with Him. And for the Christian Church, this person is none other than Jesus Christ.
Yet it can be - and always has been - more than just Jesus Christ. It is also you and I. It is also the church at work in worship and witnessing, the church at work in missions and service. How beautiful are our feet when we bring Good News to the poor, the needy, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the despised, the persecuted, the choked out and held up.
There is, though, an irony at work here too. Feet - especially feet in the ancient world - were anything but beautiful. Feet were disgusting, actually. People in the time of Isaiah and even Jesus didn't have comfortable loafers, springy sneakers, or sleek stilettos. No, for the poorest in the ancient world, shoes were a luxury that they could not access (much like is the case in the under-developed two-thirds world today). So these feet would be hard with callouses; they would be cracked and bleeding at times. They would have walked on hard rocks and through human and animal waste; they would be unclean in both the literal and religious sense of the word. They would, at any rate, be in need of a severe pedicure! And Isaiah knows this. He knows that the mention of feet would not bring to mind an image of "pretty toes" or even of strong, athletic feet. Instead, people would think of these disgusting images. Some of his listeners were probably even servants who had to clean the feet of their masters; servants who had an unenviable task of touching these disgusting appendages. So they would not think about "beauty" when feet were mentioned.
Yet this is what Isaiah proclaims because he knows that part of the Good News that is brought is the Good News of Transformation. He knew that cracked, mud-caked, smelly, bleeding feet could be transformed by this Good News. And as it transformed the feet, it worked its way up the whole person, transforming him or her into a righteousness and a godliness that was foreign to them, except that this Good News had made it so.
Today we spend - quite literally - billions of dollars on foot care (think about everything from shoes to pedicures to podiatry and beyond) and yet our feet are still just as disgusting, just as gnarled and gnarly because real beautiful feet belong to the proclaimer of Good News. So, this week, give yourself the best pedicure you can - proclaim Good News into the lives of those who need it most. Amen.