How are we to understand the privileging of Israel here? It seems beyond our understanding of God’s general justice. As Creator, God’s love is for all creation. To the extent that there are tribes, peoples, and nations, God loves each and all. We might say that God delights in the rich diversity of cultures, languages, and ethnicities. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “[God] created the great diversity of things so that the perfection lacking to one would be supplied by the others.”* Egypt, Ethiopia, Seba, the South Sudan, and the Crow nation serve to manifest the fullness of God!

But Isaiah writes out of his exilic context in which the people experience exile as a revocation of God’s covenant. Before the Israelites can receive the good news of return, God must reaffirm their covenant. As with children baptized in infancy and later lost to addiction or self-justification, the people of Israel seek God’s divine reestablishment of the covenant.

Here Isaiah gives voice to God’s covenant love for a singular people. “I have called you by name, you are mine.” This too reflects God’s wildness. In the divine economy, covenant love for a people serves love’s ecology for the whole. Devotionally, we can appropriate “you are mine” in personal ways. Yet we should not miss the original intent. God has elected Jacob and his descendants. Privilege? Exceptionalism? Yes and no. Isaiah later articulates God’s universal vision: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (49:6). Before God, privilege is for service. Listen, church! Heed this, nations!

*Summa Theologica I, q. 47, a. I.