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“If you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places … Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations; you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” –– Isaiah 58:10-11a, 12
It was a few years ago, but an old YouTube clip still brings me a giggle when I think about it. A toddler is having a bad day, or should I say a bad moment, because a toddler’s universe is always consumed by the now. His misery was neither wound-based nor the result of an injustice, at least in the mind of any court where reason prevails. No, he was obviously irked because he did not get what he demanded in the moment he demanded it, and he was insistent that his mother’s heart be turned to pity, and her hands be moved to action to satiate his desire. Thus, a seizure of hysterics was produced, and it was grand. However, his maternal audience appeared to leave the room, leaving no one to witness his Oscar-worthy performance, and so his paroxysm suddenly stopped, as if a director had yelled … Cut! But being a method actor, he dug deeper into character and went in search of his mom.
Rounding a corner he found his mother in the kitchen, and immediately his inner director called out …Action! … and he threw himself down into full tantrum mode, yet mom had the audacity to leave the room again, as if deaf to his distress. Cut! He dropped character immediately, and blessed silence returned for a moment. Well, the scene repeated itself at least three or four times. The toddler tyrant would stealthily waddle to a spot where he knew mom could see him, before recreating the moves and sounds of the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5 –– “Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.” And yet, mom was intentionally and resolutely oblivious to it all. But you have to give the little guy credit. It was quite a performance, only that is all it was … a performance. There was no suffering. There was no injustice. There was a cookie that had possessed his soul, but it would not be possessed.
It was an act of performative agony, turned on and off like as easily as a Zoom meeting. We may never make it to a stage, and may even dread the thought of it, but we spend a surprising amount of our energy and time performing to impress, cajole, bribe, or con, hoping our little act will garner us some profit, benefit, favor, reward, or advantage. We hope to portray that we are smarter, more experienced, more sincere, more generous than we actually are –– Performative friendships … performative expertise … performative concern … performative commitments … performative pain … performative exhaustion … performative love, compassion, or apologies. We want give an impression without the effort, work, emotional investment. We act, but we don’t act. Eliza Doolittle saw through the con –– Don't talk of love lasting through time. Make me no undying vow. Show me now!
The prophet Isaiah, as genuinely indignant as Eliza, exposes the human penchant for performative worship. We humans have a history of making commitments, promises, assurances, and covenants that we do not keep. In Isaiah 58, the prophet mocks the people’s complaint that God is not responding to their wants –– “Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?” So, the prophet exposes the inauthenticity of their rituals –– “Look, you serve your own interest on your fast day, and oppress all your workers. Look, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to strike with a wicked fist. Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high.”
Worship rituals are rather empty, and thus only performative, when they are not reflected in the work of love, the call to compassion, and the efforts of mercy. Isaiah exhorts all believers –– “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?”
John is even more blunt –– “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”
Amidst all the self-righteous rhetoric of self-identifying Christians today, does the result meet the rhetoric? Paul wasn’t kidding –– “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”
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