Pastor Kimberly was sitting on the rug with a group of children. She showed them a small statue of a lion lying down, with a lamb resting on its outstretched paws. She asked them what they thought of this. Brandon, one of the youngest theologians in the group, said, “Well in the Bible it says they will rest together. But in real life the lion would eat him!”[1]
The vision is glorious—real life is something else. “On the day the lion and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up,” as Woody Allen once dryly remarked. Real life is something else. Real life, young Brandon has come to understand, follows its own rules and patterns, and in the world of real life, the words and visions of the prophets are strange announcements.
Isaiah was no stranger to real life and its patterns, though, as Brandon will soon discover, assuming he continues to hang out with Pastor Kimberly. Isaiah was fluent in the language of legislation and judicial proceedings and economic analysis.
“Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,” he declared, “who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!” When orphans become prey, the predators who eat them up aren’t lions or wolves.
“What will you do on the day of punishment,” Isaiah shouted into their dens. What will you do “in the calamity that will come from far away? To whom will you flee for help, and where will you leave your wealth, so as not to crouch among the prisoners or fall among the slain?”[2] In Isaiah’s vision, the calamity from far away had everything to do with the local habits of oppression and loveless accumulation.
“Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger,” he declared, channeling with passion God’s own anger—“the club in their hands is my fury!”[3] “Look,” he announced, “the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts, will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.”[4] Big trouble in the form of Assyria’s soldiers was on its way south, approaching Jerusalem, and the lopping and chopping, cutting and hacking in Isaiah’s sentencing speech was at once an accurate description of the devastations warfare was inflicting on the land and the divine verdict against Jerusalem’s leaders. Isaiah may have been walking through the streets of Jerusalem or the outer court of the temple, but in his sad and furious and broken heart, he was stumbling through a devastated, clear-cut, and trampled landscape, with not a tree left standing, only stumps.
I read about the Amazon in the paper this week, and, having walked with Isaiah for a while, I saw a landscape of judgment:
When the smoke cleared, the Amazon could breathe easy again. For months, black clouds had hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. Now the rainy season had arrived, offering a respite to the jungle and a clearer view of the damage to the world. The picture that emerged was anything but reassuring: Brazil’s space agency reported that in one year, more than 3,700 square miles of the Amazon had been razed — a swath of jungle nearly the size of Lebanon torn from the world’s largest rainforest.[5]
With devastation on that scale, no one counts trees; it takes a space agency to assess the damage. When the smoke was still rising above the Amazon, the prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, was getting his hands in the dirt and he got much of the nation to join him. On a Monday in July,
Students, farmers, urban professionals, foreign dignitaries, environmentalists and government officials planted [more than 350 million] seedlings … in what the government said was the largest one-day tree-planting effort in history. It was part of Mr. Ahmed’s campaign to plant four billion trees in Ethiopia before the fall to combat deforestation and global warming.[6]
In the early 20th century, about one-third of Ethiopia was covered in forests, but that had dropped to just 4 percent by 2000.
To plant a tree is an inherently hopeful, life-affirming act, and I’m not surprised that those who did the planting in Ethiopia, wanted to make sure that every seedling would be counted, every single one.
Isaiah had walked amid the devastations of injustice and unneighborly rule for who knows how long, and having declared God’s judgment against those in power, he saw another vision. He saw a stump, and from under the bark a tiny green shoot had emerged. It was a glimpse of a promise of new life, and Isaiah spoke a new word. “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,” he said, “and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” Jesse was the father of king David, and David, according to the covenant promise of God, was the king whose house and kingdom would be established forever. [7]
Forever, however, assumes the kind of rule congruent and resonant with the intention of God, the kind of rule described in Psalm 72:
Give the king your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to a king’s son.
May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice.
May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,
give deliverance to the needy, and crush the oppressor.
Isaiah saw and declared the failure of the Davidic dynasty to reign with justice and righteousness, a failure that resulted in the land of promise becoming a wasteland. And yet, the prophet asserted, a shoot, a sprout, a scepter would come up from the stump of Jesse, and it would be a fruitful branch. This royal figure would, in time to come, enact all that the Davidic kings thus far had failed to accomplish. This ruler would be different because the spirit of the Lord would rest on him, would inspire, guide, and empower him. And all this newness would not stop with Jerusalem and Judah, it would extend to peoples and nations and beyond: this ruler would establish God’s heavenly reign of righeousness on earth.
The language of city and nation and neighborly social order doesn’t have the range needed to speak of a newness that stills every terror, every fear in all creation. Isaiah names wolves and lambs, leopards and kids, cows and lions, and a young child tending this mongrel herd of predators and prey. And none of them shall be afraid. Infants playing with snakes, and nursing babies with their hands reaching into the lairs of vipers, and none shall be harmed. Who has ever heard such a thing?
Isaiah saw it, and he has insisted ever since, and inspired countless others to insist, that real life has this outsized hope spoken into it: real justice, real love, real community. For us, Isaiah’s vision, Isaiah’s words, illuminate who Jesus is: God’s reign in person. God’s word in our flesh. The lamb of God who is the lion of Judah.
Andrew Delbanco, in a series of lectures turned into a book, argued that, “our hopes are a measure of our greatness. When they shrink, we ourselves are diminished.”[8] He thinks that America’s hopes have shrunk considerably since early, colonial days when the Puritans set their hope in God. Yes, he does use a rather broad brush that paints over significant details like the hopes of Native Americans or the fact that not all settlers were Puritans, but let’s save that argument for another day and see what he wants to show us. In the early days, America’s horizon of hope was God. In the nineteenth century, America placed hope in the nation—“the last best hope of mankind,” as Abraham Lincoln put it. But in the late twentieth century, America’s hope began to be focused on the self. “The story of American hope over the past two centuries is one of increasing narrowing,” he writes. The late twentieth century “conspired to install instant gratification as the hallmark of hope of the good life. By that time the horizon of hope had shrunk to the scale of self-pampering.” And that was long before the arrival of the portable, personal screen and same-day delivery.
You would think that the civil rights movement, the moon landing, and the internet would have expanded our horizon of hope, but that’s not what I’ve been picking up lately. Have you? What seems to be expanding are anxiety, fear, and despair, and hope can barely breathe. What young Brandon has learned to call real life is shrunk-horizon life, diminished life.
Isaiah saw a world expanding into the vast horizon of God’s promise, and he wants us to see it. His vision stood, and continues to stand, in direct contrast to the terror, brutality, and inequity that pervade our world. He insisted, and inspired countless others to insist, that real life has this outsized hope spoken into it: real justice, real love, real community. The Apostle Paul, working in the same vein, wrote,
whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
Young Brandon has some concerns about the lion and the lamb. We are here to encourage him to lean into that outsized hope with us, to trust with us that love abides, and to help us live in accordance with Christ Jesus.
[1] See Journal for Preachers Vol. 28, No. 1 (Advent) 2004, 6.
[2] Isaiah 10:1-4
[3] Isaiah 10:5
[4] Isaiah 10:33-34
[5] Matt Sandy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html
[6] Palko Karasz https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/world/africa/ethiopia-tree-planting-deforestation.html
[7] 2 Sam 7:16
[8] Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999)