For Fools Like Us--December 19, 2025

For Fools Like Us--December 19, 2025

"A highway shall be there,
  and it shall be called the Holy Way;
 the unclean shall not travel on it,
  but it shall be for God’s people;
  no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
 No lion shall be there,
  nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
 they shall not be found there,
  but the redeemed shall walk there.
 And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
  and come to Zion with singing;
 everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
  they shall obtain joy and gladness,
  and sorrow and sighing shall flee away." (Isaiah 35:8-10)

Every time I come across these words, it makes me smile. I see myself in that line of fools, walking along God's pathway.

I caught myself smiling in self-recognition again this past Sunday when these words were read, too.  

This scene from the prophet Isaiah's book gives us a glimpse of the utter certainty of God's saving grace.  It is, quite literally, a fool-proof sort of salvation.  The prophet here is offering a vision of hope for people who felt stuck in exile in Babylon and couldn't imagine how they would ever make it back home to their own lands and their own lives.  The Babylonian armies had captured and deported countless people of Judea by brute force, and they now languished in limbo in Babylonian territory, hundreds of miles away from their homelands but without the means, power, or ability to go back to the only places they had ever lived.  Even if they could escape the watchful eyes of the Babylonians and leave, they didn't know how to get back home, and it was a dangerous and difficult journey through unknown wilderness to get there.  It seemed hopeless--there were a million ways it could all go wrong, you know?

So here comes, Isaiah, envisioning that God will make a way--nothing short of a highway to stretch across that vast wilderness, which will bring them all the way home.  You can almost hear Isaiah anticipating the worries and questions of the exiles and getting his responses ready to assuage them:  

"But how will we know how to get home?"  And the prophet answers, "God is building the road to go directly to Jerusalem, so all you have to do is just follow the pathway laid out for you."

"But what if there are dangerous Babylonians on the road following us, or what if people with leprosy who sometimes have to go live out in the wilderness come up to us and we're afraid of getting sick?"  Isaiah pre-emptively answers, "Nothing unclean will be on the road, so you don't have to worry about getting contaminated by anybody or captured by a Babylonian."

"Okay, but what if there are lions or other predators along the way? They live in the wilderness, and we would be defenseless against them if we went out there!"  So Isaiah says, like a parent calming a child who is afraid of monsters under the bed, "There will no lions, or any other kind of ravenous beast there--I promise!"

And as if to remove any other unspoken fears, the prophet also adds this beautiful, humbling detail: "No traveler, not even fools, will go astray."  What an absolutely stunning promise.  Even when our own stupidity would have gotten us lost, God's kind of pathway keeps us on the right road.  Even when our own blockheadedness would have led us into a ditch or gotten confused about the exit signs, God insists we will not end up in the middle of nowhere.  Even when our own fear might spur us to turn tail and go back to the now-familiar misery of exile in Babylon, God's road will get us all the way home.  God's saving grace is literally fool-proof: even we cannot mess it up with our own foolishness.

I am convinced that this notion from Isaiah 35 is not an exception: it is the Standard Operating Procedure for God in the world.   God's way of saving us doesn't leave loopholes that our own stubbornness or stupidity can get through.  God's kind of rescue doesn't leave open the possibility that we will mess it up by our foolishness, orneriness, doubt, or even our sins.  God's way of saving the world is utterly foolproof--which is to say, even fools like us cannot undo it.

So often at this time of year, when we tell the story of Jesus' birth, we take notice of how precarious and fragile the whole story seems. We ask questions, maybe like the exiles who heard from Isaiah did, naming all of our what-ifs:  what if Mary had said no? What if Joseph had broken off the engagement? What if Mary's parents didn't believe her story about a divine pregnancy and had her stoned to death? What if the shepherds didn't believe the angels' message?  What if mean ol' bully King Herod had successfully tricked the Magi into giving away the location of the child they found? What if they hadn't understood the meaning of the star? There are a million ways it could have all gone wrong, you know?

And yet, the assurance of the Scriptures is that even for all the ways God's movement in the world seems fallible and fragile, God's gracious saving is ultimately foolproof.  God has already figured our foolishness, our fearfulness, and our sinfulness into the recipe, and God's commitment to redeem and restore are unthwartable all the same.  Perhaps God has decided already that all salvation has to be foolproof, because all of us in need of saving are fools.  But just as the prophet said to those people despondent in exile centuries ago, so God says to us as well: "No matter what, my love will make a way.  No matter how big the fears are and no matter how small your confidence is, I will bring you home."

That is news that is worth holding onto today, tomorrow, throughout this Christmas season, and always: God's way of saving and bringing us home really is foolproof--even for fools like us.

Lord God, despite our fears and worries about what could go wrong along the way, bring us home and bring us to you.