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]
Ellen M. drew a picture of the scene from Isaiah as her contribution to our Advent devotional booklet this year. In Ellen’s picture, the lion doesn’t eat the lamb. Both look at the viewer, together with the leopard and the goat and the calf – all of them look at us from the page with wide open eyes, perhaps a little startled by this most unusual arrangement of peace between predator and prey. In Ellen’s picture, only the wolf doesn’t look at the viewer, but at something off to the side, beyond the edge of the page. Perhaps the wolf is watching the toddler playing at the adder’s den, waiting for the peaceful moment to come to a sudden end? Disbelief creeps into the scene, we can’t help it. “On the day the lion and the lamb lie down together, only the lion is going to get back up,” Woody Allen once dryly remarked.
Prophetic vision is one thing; real life is something else. Real life is reflected in news headlines and end-of-year statistics, we tell ourselves, not in Bible stories. In real life we are anxious to hear about the war in Ukraine, the protests in Iran and China, the growing despair in Haiti, the famine in East Africa, and the water levels in the Mississippi. Real life, young Brandon has come to understand, follows its own rules, and in the real-life world, the visions of the prophets are strange announcements.
Isaiah is no stranger to real life, though, as young Brandon will soon discover, assuming he continues to hang out with Pastor Kimberly. Isaiah is fluent in the real-life language of legislation and judicial proceedings and economic analysis.
Woe to you who make iniquitous decrees, 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 are made prey, the predators who eat them up aren’t wolves or lions. “What will you do on the day of punishment,” Isaiah shouts 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]
Isaiah underlines what connects the local habits of oppression and what he calls the calamity from far away: the armies of Assyria. “The rod of my anger,” the God Isaiah serves has called them. “The club in their hands is my fury!”[3]
Look, 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]
Isaiah is no stranger to real life; big trouble is on its way south, approaching Jerusalem, and the lopping and chopping, cutting and hacking in Isaiah’s sentencing speech is at once an accurate description of the devastations of warfare and the divine verdict against the real-life leaders.
I imagine the prophet walking through the streets of the city, but in his sad and furious, broken heart, he is stumbling through a devastated, clear-cut, and trampled landscape, with only smoldering stumps emerging from the ashes that cover the land. I am reminded of images and reports from the Amazon, where thick clouds of smoke hung over the rainforest as work crews burned and chain-sawed through it. The native peoples driven from their land and driven to extinction together with the forest, know the devastation better than any of us, in every aspect of their life and culture. The rest of us depend on satellite images to reveal the extent of destruction, once the rains have washed the smoke from the air: thousands of square miles of forest razed, swaths of jungle the size of small countries destroyed in a matter of months.[5]
Isaiah is no stranger to real life. It was a common tactic in war: the enemy troops set up camp in a ring around the city, just beyond reach of the defenders’ spears and arrows. They stopped all incoming and outgoing traffic, putting an end to all trade. Then they burned all fields and systematically chopped down every fruit-bearing tree in walking distance, clearcutting a wide swath of land around the city. Then they just waited until the inhabitants ran out of food and water – why risk the lives of your troops in battle if you can starve a population into submission?
I imagine Isaiah walking amid the stumps. The land of promise has become a wasteland; the city sits in dust and ashes. He doesn’t lift his head; he doesn’t raise his eyes, he keeps them on the ground, waiting for a word from the God of Zion. I imagine Isaiah walking the land, witnessing the devastation, the continuing violence and oppression, and the lack of true repentance among the people and their leaders. And then he sees on one of the stumps, pushing through the scorched bark, bright green and full of life, a tiny shoot. And it speaks the word of the Lord to him:
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
Jesse was the father of king David, long before Isaiah’s time. God had made a promise to David that his house and kingdom would be established forever in Jerusalem. [6] Forever, however, was profoundly in question given the record of the house of David. Forever assumed a kind of rule congruent with the purposes 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.
Hopes were high that the reign of God in heaven would be reflected in the life of God’s people on earth. But it wasn’t justice and peace that flourished in Isaiah’s days; the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, much as in our own time. I imagine the prophet kneeling in the dust, clinging to the faithfulness of God.
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
This one wouldn’t be a puppet of the powerful, for a change. The spirit of the Lord would rest on him, and his governance would be in tune with God’s will. This one would judge the poor with righteousness and decide with equity for the meek of the earth. Kneeling in the dust and ashes, the prophet receives a reaffirmation of God’s commitment to justice and peace. And this commitment is cosmic in scale: Not only are the widow, the orphan, the migrant worker, and the refugee no longer prey for those in power – the shoot from the stump of Jesse establishes a peace that stills every terror, every fear in all of creation.
The lion’s idea of peace is simple. It is the good life without competition: no leopards, no bears, no wolves or shepherds; just a steady supply of tender lambs and fatted calves – all for the lion. The lion’s idea of paradise is a world where the lambs are so fat that they can’t run away, or so stupid that they won’t even try.
The lamb’s dream of peace is a world without lions. Yet Isaiah speaks of one who brings peace to the lamb and the lion. Real life, Isaiah insists, is not what we think we’ve always known, but rather this vision of peace that inspires us to hope and to dare.
Isaiah’s vision of the peaceable kingdom includes human beings, young children – the nursing child, the weaned child, the little child – but no adults. Paul Duke suggests that this is because “the new creation wants a human presence – new, bright, undefended, and free – to love and care for it all.” And then he adds, “This, of course, is the child we seek in Christ, in whom the lion of Judah and the lamb of God are one. In this Child we meet the divine vulnerability and the divine strength.”[7]
Real life emerges in the reign of the one who is the lion and the lamb, who accomplishes in us the “deep, radical, limitless transformation in which we – like lion, wolf, and leopard – will have no hunger for injury, no need to devour, no yearning for brutal control, no passion for domination.”[8] Or as Thomas Merton put it, “The Advent mystery is the beginning of the end of all in us that is not yet Christ.” [9]
Asked about the lion with a lamb resting on its outstretched paws, young Brandon said, “Well, in the Bible it says they will rest together. But in real life the lion would eat him!”
We are here to encourage him to trust, together with Ellen and the rest of us that Isaiah’s fantastic vision of wide-eyed wonder is more real than the diminished life we create for each other without such vision. We encourage him and one another to believe in the deep, radical, limitless transformation in which we – like lion, wolf, and leopard – will have no hunger for injury, no need to devour, no yearning for brutal control, no passion for domination – only life in the fullness of God’s peace.
[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] See Matt Sandy https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/world/americas/amazon-fires-bolsonaro-photos.html
[6] 2 Sam 7:16
[7] Paul S. Duke, Feasting, Year A, Vol. 1, 31.
[8] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 1-39 (WBC), 103.
[9] Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration: Meditations on the Cycle of Liturgical Feasts (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2009), 77.