This haftarah opens the entire book of Isaiah with a sweeping indictment: God has raised children who have then rebelled, and even an ox knows its owner and a donkey its master's stall, yet Israel does not know or understand. The land is described as desolate, and Zion left like a shelter in a vineyard after the harvest, a besieged remnant barely surviving.
Isaiah rejects the sheer volume of sacrifices being offered as meaningless while the hands presenting them are full of blood, and calls instead for the people to wash themselves clean, to stop doing evil and learn to do good, to seek justice, correct oppression, and defend the orphan and the widow, offering the famous invitation that though their sins are like scarlet, they can become white as snow.
The haftarah closes with a lament opening on the word how, eichah in the Hebrew, asking how the faithful city has become a harlot, once full of justice and now filled instead with murderers, before promising that Zion will eventually be redeemed through justice and its penitent through righteousness, a passage whose opening word gives this particular Sabbath its name, Shabbat Chazon, and directly echoes the opening word of the Book of Lamentations read on Tisha B'Av itself.