Imagine (Advent 2A, 3A, 4A Isaiah passages)

The Jesee Tree

Imagine

--The Rev. Anthony A. Hutchinson, Ph.D.

5 December 2010 Advent 2A Isaiah 11:1-10 

12 December 2010 Advent 3A Isaiah 35:1-10

19 December 2010 Advent 4A  Isaiah 7:10-16

A Comment on Advent Isaiah Readings

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

There is a traditional West African story that in various forms has often been retold in literature and films.  A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a river. The frog is afraid of being stung, but the scorpion reassures him that if it stung, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well. The frog then agrees.  But in mid-river, the scorpion stings him, dooming them both.  When asked why, the scorpion explains, "I'm a scorpion; it's my nature."  They both then drown.

Now if the moral you draw from this story is “watch out—people do not always base their actions on rationally considered self-interest,” good.  But if you draw the moral, “there is no hope for anyone ever changing for the good,” I think you have made a serious mistake. 

The call throughout the Hebrew scriptures is, “Turn back,  turn back, O Israel—Shuvu, shuvu, Yisrael.”  And though we may have lost our freedom—whether through some primordial missing of the mark in the origin of our race (“Original Sin”), or through bad actions of our own that have become habits, that in turn have become addiction of one sort or another—the gist of much of the Christian Testament is that for God, nothing is impossible.    That doesn’t mean necessarily that God will take us where we want to go, but that God will take us where God wants us to be, no matter how hard it may appear.  Our job is to try get out of the way, to try to attune ourselves in such a way that we are working with God and not against him.  

Isaiah the Prophet, in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling 

The Isaiah readings we often hear this time of year about “Immanuel,” and a shoot sprouting up from the stump of Jessee are both from the first part of the Book of Isaiah, and come from the lifetime of the prophet, living in the eighth century before the Common Era.  They address the question of whether what we see before our eyes at the present time is “all there is,” is “as good as it gets,” or is “as good as it can get.”   Their answer is an emphatic “No, there is much more and there will be much more.”

Isaiah lived in a world of great and horrifying change.  The first great two international Empires in world history—Assyria and Egypt—had arisen in the suite of turmoil caused by climate change that had disrupted the political arrangements of a thousand years.  Between the two lay the tiny kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the split remnants of the glory days of the early Hebrews, the united kingdom of Jesse’s son David and David’s son Solomon.  Most of the politics of both Israel, Judah, and their neighbor kingdom Aram, centered on the question of how to best survive with such threatening super states all around:  factions supported either allying with Egypt and standing up to the Assyrians or simply paying the exorbitant taxes the Assyrians demanded. 

Isaiah was called to be a prophet the year that king Uzziah died (Isa. 6:1).  This is significant because the short term of Uzziah’s successor was immediately followed by Ahaz, whom the Biblical authors considered to be one of the worst kings in the history of Judah.  Where Biblical authors say that Uzziah "did that which was right in the sight of the Lord" (2 Kings 15:3; 2 Chronicles 26:4-5), Ahaz was another thing altogether.   He was allured the various religious around him, cults that personified wealth, power, sexual pleasure, and fertility in the figures of such deities as Baal and Astarte his consort.  Ahaz even put their sculpted images and altars in the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem, probably arguing that Yahweh and Baal were different names for the same reality. Worst of all, when his international policies failed and he lost wars, he took this as evidence that he had done not enough to honor the gods of the “winners,” and thus revived the practice of human sacrifice, even sacrificing one of his own children. 

Isaiah saw all of this as an unmitigated disaster, one that basically had ended the line of Judah’s kings—going back to Jesse’s son David—and all that mattered in Judah’s national life. 

A new form of political leader had arisen in Assyria—Tiglath-Pileser III, who took power in a military coup and then proceeded to form the first Imperial Power in world history truly based on a centralized military and bureaucracy.  In 735 BCE, King Pekah of Israel (also called “Ephraim”) joined with Rezin, king of Aram with his capital at Damascus, in a tax revolt against Assyria.  The two threatened the king of Judah, Ahaz, to force him to join the revolt. 

In Isaiah 7, the prophet goes out to meet Ahaz as he is inspecting the city’s water works to insure he can withstand a siege from Aram and Israel.  He is contemplating throwing in his lot with the biggest “winner” of all, Assyria.   In a passage we often hear this time of year (Isa 7:1-17), he tells Ahaz,

Be careful, keep calm and don’t be afraid. Do not lose heart because of  . . . Aram and of [Israel], Yet this is what the Lord Yahweh says:
  ‘It will not take place,
   it will not happen, …
   Within sixty-five years
   [both countries will cease to exist]
If you do not stand firm in your faith,
   you will not stand at all. …’

Then Isaiah offers proof of the validity of his words by predicting that Ahaz will soon have a son, and that before that child old enough to know right and wrong (and reject Ahaz’s bad ways), the two nations that Ahaz is fearing will be destroyed and a great national disaster will make reduce the population to the degree that the boy will be raised eating the food of a changed economy:

… the Lord himself will give you^[ a sign: a young woman [that is what the Hebrew says, the Greek translation of it makes this sign all the more marvelous by suggesting, “a young woman who is as of now still a virgin”] will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him “God with us.” He will be eating curds and honey before he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right,  for before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right, the land of the two kings you dread will be laid waste.  Yahweh will bring on you and on your people and on the house of your father a time unlike any since Ephraim broke away from Judah—he will bring the king of Assyria.

But Ahaz did not heed Isaiah’s call, and instead actually called upon Tiglath-Pileser (the Bible calls him “Pul” in 2 Kings 15:19) to come to his aid and put down the revolt.  This the Assyrian did with a vengeance.  By 732, the he had destroyed Damascus, installed an Assyrian governor, and made Aram a province of the Assyrian Empire.  By 722, Tiglath-Pileser’s successor had destroyed Israel as well.   He annexed all of Israel, killed its king, installed an Assyrian governor, and deported tens of thousands of the leading elites of the tiny rebellious state.  Israel, simply, had ceased to exist as a nation.  

 

Hezekiah's Water Tunnel

But the sign offered by Isaiah, the birth of a son to Ahaz, took place.  His name was Hezekiah, one of the kings of Judah most praised by the Biblical writers.   Hezekiah took the idols out of the Temple and reformed worship.  Much of the Bible’s treasure of Wisdom literature was written during Hezekiah’s reign, including Ecclessiastes, Proverbs, and the Song of Songs.  Hezekiah built the Broad Wall, which doubled the space protected from attack in the city, including for the first time the city’s western suburbs.  To keep the city supplied with water during an extended siege (a reasonable precaution, given the Assyrians’ methods) he had a 500 meter tunnel known as Hezekiah’s Tunnel (still there today) dug to bring in spring water underground.  

So Isaiah had some reason to hope against hope that finally things would be put to right.  He saw the death of Ahaz and Hezekiah’s accession to the throne as a break with the past, a new hope.    He described the line of the Davidic kings as a tree springing from David’s father Jesse.  As far as Isaiah was concerned, Ahaz had all but destroyed that tree.  It was now but the dead stump of a tree that had been cut down.  But the prospects for Hezekiah’s reign were good.  So he describes it as a sprout springing up from the dead stump: 

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

This is a loaded image rich with Isaiah’s acerbic irony.  He calls the Davidic dynasty a dead stump.  It is cut down and useless, seemingly at an end.  But this bit of satire contains a hope rooted in Isaiah’s trust in God to be faithful to his promises.

  

Portrayal of good king Hezekiah in crown of Holy Roman Emperors

He makes Hezekiah a tender sprout or shoot coming up from the apparently dead stump.  He describes the qualities of an ideal ruler that he thinks will make such a revival possible: 

His delight shall be in awe before Yahweh.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide by what his ears hear;

but with justice he shall vindicate the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Justice shall be the belt around his waist,

and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

But then in a leap of fantastic imagination, he says that this ideal king of the future will make all things right:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.

No one will hurt or destroy

On all my holy mountain;

For the earth will be full of the knowledge of Yahweh

As the waters cover the sea.

On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Modern readers can look at this and think, “Clearly, Isaiah was getting carried away by his own enthusiasm for the new king.”  We do this because we have become somewhat jaded about what political leaders can do.  We all remember what high expectations everyone had (sympathetically or otherwise) when Barrack Obama became President of the U.S.  Many at the time said that there was no way that this man who was elected on a platform of hope for change could reasonably fulfill his supporters expectations.   They did so based on prior experience with new Presidents:  the job is just too hard and complicated for anyone to do it perfectly.  The Onion satirically headlined at the time. “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job.”

Hezekiah did turn things around in many ways for Judah, but did not end up being the ideal king of the future in Isaiah’s rich poetry.   He faced the same international relations problems as Ahaz, and eventually revolted against Assyria too, unsuccessfully trying to get Egypt to come to his aid.  Archaeology suggests that his reforms in putting down irregular worship domestically were not as thorough as the Biblical authors describe.  At one point later in his life, Isaiah even had to chastise Hezekiah for getting too cozy with another Assyrian rival, Babylon (2 Kings 20:12-19). 

But there is something larger at work here than simple naïve enthusiasm for a new king.  The transcendent hope expressed in the image of transformed nature is found elsewhere in the first part of Isaiah in passages not directly addressing the ideal future king, but rather addressing in general Yahweh’s goodness and ultimate triumph over what is wrong in the world. In Isaiah 35 (perhaps written after Hezekiah had turned out not to be the true ideal king of the future), we read:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

the desert shall rejoice and blossom;

…

They shall see the glory of the LORD,

the majesty of our God.

…

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you."

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,

and the ears of the deaf unstopped;

then the lame shall leap like a deer,

and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,

and streams in the desert;

the burning sand shall become a pool,

and the thirsty ground springs of water.

Such hope and poetic power ensured that the words of Isaiah would live, and his imaginative portrayal of an ideal future king who would set all things right lived on with them.  When the early Gospel writers were trying to find the words to describe Jesus, they turned to Isaiah’s ideal future king regularly.    “Son of David,” “Prince of Peace,” “Immanuel,” “son of a virgin”—all of these images and more come from Isaiah or Greek versions of Isaiah.But are the Gospel writers’ use of Isaiah in this way just a case of a tall tale growing in the retelling?   I think that Christian faith requires us to say “No.”

Note that Isaiah’s image of the ideal king of the future contains elements that are patently self-contradictory and impossible from a literal reading:  he says that as a result of the future king’s rule, carnivores and herbivores will all eat grass, and no natural predation will occur.    Isaiah was not an ignorant man.  He knew very well that cows and sheep had different digestive systems from lions and panthers, and that predation was in the very nature of some animals.  Yet he says that in the ideal future reign, all animals would live without the battle of “nature red in tooth and claw.”   

He is basically saying that as the result of the future ideal king, even nature itself will be transcended, and the seeming impossible will be made possible.  I doubt that he meant such words literally applying to Hezekiah.  He intended them metaphorically.  He was imagining a world where predation ceased, whether it was Assyrians on petty states, the rich on the poor, or lions and bears on sheep and cows. 

And here we come to the central point I want to take from these passages today—imagination.  In a world that is perhaps too concerned about the literal meaning of things, about the practical, and about the realistically feasible or likely, our imagination is a great gift. 

“He’s imagining things.”  “Isaiah has let his imagination get the better of him.”  “The Gospel writers simply imagined that Isaiah foretold the birth of Jesus.”  All of these phrases betray a contempt, or at least a healthy suspicion, of the human imagination. 

We tend to see the imagination as a creative activity of the mind.  But the great Church fathers, most specifically St. Thomas Aquinas, saw the imagination as an instrument of perception, as a way of seeing things that were not otherwise readily apparent to the senses.  The basis of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises is trained use of the imagination in reflection on scriptural passages.

The metaphorical use of the “heart” (“of one heart and mind” “follow your heart”) has suffered a similar fate in the West as the idea of the imagination.  We tend to think the heart is merely the center of emotion or feeling, and as a result it is sometimes seen as a mere epiphenomenon.   But, as Cynthia Bourgeault points out, traditionally in Western and Eastern spiritualities, the heart too is an organ of perception, something with which we see that which is not otherwise readily apparent.   Paying attention to how we emotionally react to things can tell us many things about ourselves, and with this, about our world. 

Isaiah here is imagining what he certainly knew was impossible under normal circumstances.  He imagines the transformation of nature itself—not only of lions, bears, panthers, asps, and vipers, but of human beings and their rulers.  His imagination is based on trust in God’s promise, and on God’s goodness and justice. 

When we Christians apply these prophecies about the ideal future Davidic king, this anointed one (or “Messiah”) , to Jesus of Nazareth, it is based on our experience of the Risen One’s power to transform us and those around us.  It is an act of imagination, to be sure, but one that we believe  describes the underlying realities of the world around us.  

We all need hope desperately.  This is a world that is lost if it does not have hope.  Without hope, we are likely to think that change is impossible, that how things are now are as good as it possibly can get, and that isn’t too good.  Without hope, without our imaginations seeing the ground for hope beyond the current crisis or horror, we are likely to see the world wholly as described in the story of the scorpion and the frog.

In our prayers during the rest of Advent, let us use our hearts to perceive, let us use our imaginations to see.  Let us be taken up into these stories.  As we near Christmas, let us, in the words of the Nine Lessons and Carols Service, ourselves go with the shepherds and see this babe lying in a manger.   May we see the vision of a transformed world that Isaiah saw, and see it in the person of Christ.

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

Let us pray.

Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.