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Trustworthy with the whole wide world: Isaiah 11.1-16

Posted in logos, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 22, 2025| Leave a Comment »

A sermon delivered to the family of Wethersfield (CT) Evangelical Free Church, 22 December 2025


if you’ve been with us over the last few weeks, you know that we are immersed in a sermon series entitled In God We Trust. Today’s message is the last installment in that series. I’ve given it the title ‘Trustworthy with the whole wide world’.

In the interest of time, I’m going to read just the first ten verses of today’s Bible passage.Is. 11:1 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. 2 And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. 3 And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, 4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5 Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

Is. 11:6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

Is. 11:10 In that day the root of Jesse, who shall stand as a signal for the peoples—of him shall the nations inquire, and his resting place shall be glorious.

Is. 11:11 In that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Cush, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea.

Is. 11:12 He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. 13 The jealousy of Ephraim shall depart, and those who harass Judah shall be cut off; Ephraim shall not be jealous of Judah, and Judah shall not harass Ephraim. 14 But they shall swoop down on the shoulder of the Philistines in the west, and together they shall plunder the people of the east. They shall put out their hand against Edom and Moab, and the Ammonites shall obey them. 15 And the LORD will utterly destroy the tongue of the Sea of Egypt, and will wave his hand over the River with his scorching breath, and strike it into seven channels, and he will lead people across in sandals. 16 And there will be a highway from Assyria for the remnant that remains of his people, as there was for Israel when they came up from the land of Egypt.

There are snakes in that passage!

I don’t like snakes. 

Actually, I should probably be a little more specific before I go writing off all 3,400 species of snakes in a couple of words. And I actually love the big Eastern Garter Snakes that appear in our yard and the woods just beyond when the Spring sun warms up their cold, clammy bodies and they begin looking for rodents and toads to fill their tummies.

So let me give you a new version of this opening declaration: I don’t like poisonous snakes. For many years, I had recurring nightmares about them.

You see, I spent five months during my college years living out in the jungles of Costa Rica, way too up close and personal with one kind of poisonous sake. It was called the Terciopelo, a word that in Spanish means ‘velvet’. It’s a pit viper, sometimes known as Fer-de-lance. I knew an indigenous family in our little Assemblies of God church who had lost their young mother one dark night as they made their way home from church along the trail that let to their thatch-roofed house. She felt a little pinprick on her ankle, went home, lay down, and never woke up. She’d been bitten by a Terciopelo.

And I remember some older Bribri indigenous women on a different day, washing their families’ clothes in a deep part of the creek, savagely hacking away with their machetes at a Terciopelo that had dared to invade their washing area. I hope they got him…



Years later, when I moved back to Costa Rica with a young family as missionaries, another snake contributed to one of the most troubling memories of my life.

My boys, Christopher and Johnny, are only thirteen months apart. They’re big dudes now, both wearing the uniform of US Army majors in point-of-the-0spear military vocations, so it feels a little strange to be talking about them as vulnerable little boys. But that’s what they were back then.

We had driven down to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica on a little end-of-year vacation. I had Christopher in my arms out in the surf, which was kind of loud that day. I could see little Johnny, a toddler, walking back and forth on the beach. Then suddenly I could also see a snake on the beach. Johnny was oblivious to the snake, and no adults were paying attention. I watched in horror as Johnny and the snake approached each other. I don’t remember whether I was able to cry out, but nobody would have heard me over the surf anyway. At the last minute, a young man saw what was happening, grabbed Johnny by the hand, and led him to a safe distance. Then a crowd gathered. I suspect the poor snake didn’t live long after that. 

And now Pastor Scott assigns me a text with this verse at its core:

(8) The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

I can feel my snake-related PTSD kicking in, even as we speak.

And now that I’m complaining about things I don’t like, here’s another one: people who dream, even on Christian grounds, of paradise … people who try to call this broken, bleeding world of ours a paradise … people who look away from all that’s wrong because it’s scary out there. And yet this messianic text from the Old Testament book of Isaiah utilizes the language of paradise to describe the Savior we have come to know as Jesus.

Let’s try to figure out what’s going on here and what God would say to us this morning through his Word.

Now, in order to get a grip on this passage, we need to look back in two ways.

First, we have to realize that back in chapter 2, the book of Isaiah gives us its vision of visions. That’s the frame that today’s chapter 11 and a host of other chapters in Isaiah are coloring in. Today’s chapter is not the first look into the Lord’s purpose for his world. In the book of Isaiah, chapter 11 is not the first word in that conversation.

Chapter 2’s vision of visions is that first word. It sets the direction of the book of Isaiah by describing an eventual world that only the God of Israel could create. It’s short, just four very compact verses. I’d like to read Isaiah’s vision of visions for you, and then we’ll come back to our passage for today, Isaiah 11.

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the teaching (law), and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

 He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:2-4 ESV)

I mentioned that we need to look back in two ways. Absorbing chapter two’s vision of visions is the first one.

 Here’s the second one: we have to realize that a conversation about a mysterious survivor that will crawl out of the ashes of God’s exiled people is also a conversation that started some time ago in this book. Scripture loves to talk about t his re-born remnant by using the image of a tree that’s been felled and is presumed dead. And then a tiny shoot emerges from it that will be for the blessing of the whole world. If we were reading consecutively through Isaiah, we’d realize this. We would have already gathered those threads together. But we don’t have that privilege, so part of my job this morning is to bring us up to speed so we can be good hearers of this passage, Isaiah 11.

Now, fast forward to Isaiah 11 and here comes that image again: 

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. (Isaiah 11:1 ESV)

Isaiah is looking forward to something like a Holocaust for Israel, a national tragedy so horrifying that it buy all right should have exterminated this chosen people. Yet out of the national mutilation that we call the Babylonian exile, the prophet says, some little bud of life will emerge and will grow up to become a blessing to all nations … to all flesh … to many peoples.

Now hang in with me here, because this is not easy stuff: Over centuries, the writers of Christian Scripture came to the conclusion that in addition to speaking of a re-born nation, this image of a shoot out of a dead tree also captured the essence of Jesus our Messiah, our anointed Savior.

Let’s look at a few of our passage’s most compelling claims about him.

First … He is absolutely saturated with the Lord’s Spirit:

(2) And the Spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

This resting of the Spirit of the Lord upon his anointed savior is like the resting of a heavy snowfall upon the landscape. Or like a layer of thick fog that comes to rest on the Connecticut River. You look down on it as you driver over a bridge or descend into Bradley Airport and you realize how lush and full the covering is. Close readers of this passage over the centuries have not missed the fact that the Spirit of the Lord is mentioned here seven times … seven being the perfect number. Jesus, we are invited to understand, is perfectly saturated with God’s Spirit.

We should also understand that the presence of the Lord’s Spirit is not primarily ornamental or aesthetic. Rather, it equips him, it empowers him to see reality and respond to reality and then shape reality with tremendous perception. 

Do you see it there in verses 3-5?

And his delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide disputes by what his ears hear, 4but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

This anointed agent of God’s redemption gets reality. He sees through charades and distractions. He is committed to justice even when human beings become very adept at disguising injustice as justice … and lies as truth … and self-interest as just the way things are. And he’s clearly on the side of and involved in the fate of the most vulnerable. He gets involved with the poor and the meek (v. 4). He is a lethal enemy of the wicked.

So not exactly Jesus meek and mild here, though certainly a kind of meekness will be apparent in the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth. This is our Christmas season’s baby Jesus, that much is true, but Jesus ‘all growed up’—as my Father would have said—and serving as his Father’s own anointed Son in this world, forging a world that aligns with God’s own purpose rather than lurching bloodily off in its own directions.

Now let’s get to that paradise scene­—snakes and all—that is the result of this Spirit-anointed person’s work … this survivor of devastation … this shoot out of a dead, fallen tree:

 6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

Now in a moment I’m going to ask you to take on faith something that’s not evident in this paradise package itself. However, it would become very clear if we had the time for me to take you back into that vision of visions of chapter 2. If in some other space and time we had that luxury, I’d be able to show you the subtle connections between chapter 2 and chapter 11. One after the other, they pile up on each other to make it all but indisputable that … here comes the thing I want to tell you: this is not about animals!!!

These are nations. This is metaphor. It’s a kind of little parable. It’s not really about wolves and lambs, it’s about Russia and Ukraine. It’s not really about leopards and goats, it’s about the US and Venezuela. It’s not really about a nursing child and a cobra, it’s Palestine and Israel. It’s not really about cows and bears, it’s about Democrats and Republicans. It’s not really about calves and lions, it’s about progressives and conservatives.

Something about this anointed figure’s engagement with the nations will create a kind of just peace that is scarcely imaginable on this 21st of December, 2025, in this familiar place of ours, Wethersfield, Connecticut.

But Scripture is not trafficking in illusions or false paradises or spiritual abstractions that have nothing to do with the real world. This is not as mystical and other-worldly as you might imagine. Rather, it is fleshing out the Lord’s purpose for his messiah and his world. The messiah whose birth we celebrate on Thursday of this week, the world in which you and I love our brief but critically important lives.

This passage culminates in what may for me be the most meaningful declaration in all of Scripture:

They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:9 ESV)

Here, in verse 9, Isaiah drops his guard. He steps outside of his parable of the animal paradise and speaks about people openly. More accurately, he speaks about nations. It tells us that in some undated future, these nations will no longer oppose the God of Israel, hurting and destroying on his holy mountain. This is a glance back to the vision of visions in Isaiah 2, where they become eager students of his teaching upon that holy mountain.

It also says this: 

For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

Now again, I have to ask you to take something I’m going to say on faith: as a forty-year student of the Hebrew Bible—our Old Testament—I can tell you what this does not mean and suggest to you what it does mean.

It doesn’t mean that some abstract spiritual reality—the knowledge of God—will cover this earth as the waters cover the sea. The Hebrew Bible doesn’t talk like that … in mystical attractions. Those are not its native tongue. It means that people who know the Lord … nations who know the Lord … will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

But sometimes we don’t see that so much…

If you can back away from the current moment and take in the wide scope of human history since Pentecost, you can glimpse quite a bit of it. I recommend you read Tom Holland’s book Dominion. Holland, who does not claim Christian faith, is an historian who documents the way Christianity that during twenty centuries has nourished and sustained the values that most of us in the Western world would affirm as just and beautiful. Values that generate and sustain things like … democracy … hospitals … orphanges … respect for women and children … the crazy notion that every human being is a reflection, an image of Creator God and should be treated as such.

These ideas, these values, these practices do not occur in nature. They are not features of the jungle. No, they reside downstream from centuries of Christianity’s leavening and even redeeming influence upon cultures.

Because of Karen’s and my particular calling to emerging Christian leaders in the Global South, we regularly find ourselves as observes of the promise in today’s passage. May I tell you about Mohammed, Lifa, and Miryam?

These are not their real names because this message is being recorded. In October they were three of my students at a seminary in Beirut, Lebanon, where I teach a class every year. Mohammed is Moroccan, a Muslim-background follower of Jesus. Lifa, also a Muslim-background follower of Jesus, is a Kurdish woman from Syria who’s been forcibly displaced with her family to Lebanon, courtesy of the Sunni extremists who we short-hand as ISIS. Miryam is an Armenian Christian believer, also from Syria. All of them have suffered.

Mohammed looks so much like the Celtics’ injured Jason Tatum that, when I put a picture of JT up on the screen in October, we all laughed for two minutes. At a certain poignant moment in our Isaiah class, I asked my students—again, these are people who have suffered at the hands of others—if they hate, Mohammed said ‘I used to’. Jesus has drained the hate from his heart, and he is an evangelist among both his Muslim neighbors and online conversation partners.

Lifa is a thirty-something mother and wife, shy and unassuming. She describes without any sense of pride the group of 80 Muslim women whom she shepherds in Beirut, many of them already followers of Jesus, some of them on their way to embracing Jesus, all of them from Muslim backgrounds as she is.

To understand Miryam, it would help if you know something of the Armenian Genocide, one of the twentieth century’s most awful experiences of ethnic cleansing. Miryam spoke with me about how her church fed and housed Turkish-speaking refugees when the ISIS-inspired violence in her region became particularly brutal. I asked her how that happened. She said quietly, ‘Well, we were both suffering the same way. We used to hate the Turks because of what they did to our people, but not anymore. Jesus changed us.’

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. 9 They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.

But we don’t live in Syria or Morocco or Lebanon …. or Colombia or Venezuela. What are we to do with Isaiah 11?

I have just a few suggestions to leave with you today in the face of that question. The gospel of course is all of grace. But it’s not cheap grace, not an inert, passive grace. It’s a grace that empowers and shapes our lives. It points us in a certain direction and then promises the power of God so that we can follow through. In that spirit, I’ll allow myself three ‘musts’.

  1. We must not lose hope based on any momentary darkness.
    1. Jewish theology is correct when it says that despair is the sin of all sins. It demolishes our perspective. It captivates our hope. It quenches our love.
  2. We must believe that the Lord has not relented on his purpose to see all nations redeemed.
    1. If it’s tempting to think so from our perspective, then we need somehow to broaden our perspective. We need to look around at believers who are different than us or from other parts of the world. We need to sit at their feet and learn from them. They have often suffered so much and maintained their confidence in the triumph of God’s redeeming love.
  3. We must become gritty, tenacious, resilient peacemakers.
    1. We must identify and call out hatred in our own hearts and, sometimes, in the hearts of our brothers and sisters. When it occurs, we must name it. The Proverbs assure us that the rebuke of a friend is like a kiss on the lips.
    1. Ours are difficult times. But they are not uniquely difficult, they are just difficult. We flatter ourselves if we think our circumstances are that special. It has not become impossible to be a peacemaking follower of our Messiah. It’s just hard.
    1. Our task, as the apostle Paul puts it, is to be God’s own co-workers in a day that brings with it a certain darkness. We can do this. And it’s worth doing it. Because one day … in God’s own way … the earth will be full of those who know the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

May it be so. And merry Christmas.

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the nations’ eager humility: Isaiah 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , , on October 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah’s Vision of Visions (2.1-5) is shared by the book of Micah in its fourth chapter. It is much disputed whether one borrowed from the other or whether both drew their visionary waters from a common well. In the book called Isaiah, this short glimpse of a prophetically imagined future becomes the deeply driven pillar of the entire adventure. It is Isaiah’s very Vision of Visions.

Both editions, that of Micah and that of Isaiah, speak identically of the nations’ animated conversation as they flow on their riverine course all the way up to recently elevated Zion. A feature of the exchange appears to bear out the wider impression that in Isaiah salvation is from the Jews and for the nations.

I refer to the combination of the verb ירה (to teach) with the preposition מן (conventionally, from) mediating the verb’s relationship with its direct object דרכיו (his ways). Nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, outside of Micah’s and Isaiah’s shared vision, does this construction appear.

In my view, the preposition is best understood as partitive מן, an established manner of communicating ‘part of’, ‘some of’, or ‘a portion of’. If we apply what we know of the expression to its appearance in Isaiah’s Vision of Visions (and of course Micah’s version of the same), verse two comes to read as follows:

Many peoples shall come and say, ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us some of his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’ For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

Isaiah 2:3 (NRSV, adapted for partitive מן)

There is nothing in the ebullient eagerness of the nations that suggests a limited appetite for YHWH’s instruction. Rather, the limit seems to apply to their expectation.

In the turned-on-its-head world that the prophet glimpses, aliens stream to lowly Zion now elevated above the vastness of the world’s topography, hungering and thirsting after righteousness as a later prophet might have described them. Yet even they cannot imagine that the God of Jacob might slake their entire thirst, might lay out the full banquet for such unwashed late arrivals.

So, in a reading of the text that appears to me entirely defensible, they hedge their bets.

…that he may teach us some of his ways…

‘Perhaps we’ll be allowed some tasty crumbs’, one almost imagines them to hope.

Little do they know.

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motley crew: Isaiah 60

Posted in textures, tagged , , , , , , on September 28, 2022| Leave a Comment »

Isaiah 60 must figure in anyone’s list of the most powerfully lyrical of this long book’s offerings. This chapter’s vision of Zion’s restoration is breathtakingly beautiful.

Along the way, it gathers up the components of the book’s multi-faceted view of ‘the nations’ and their destiny and presents a composite—a hopeful reader might dare say coherent—picture that is not reductive and therefore demands patient rather than dismissive reading or radical reconstruction.

In the paragraphs that follow, I attempt to enumerate the pertinent allusions to those nations and to abbreviate the nature of the light that each casts on what I am persuaded is indeed a coherent if complex presentation.

First, restored Zion is brightly lit. By contrast, the nations live in darkness but are drawn (והלכו, shall come).

Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.

For darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will appear over you.

Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

Isaiah 60:1-3 (NRSV)

Second, the nations exercise important agency in transporting Zion’s sons and daughters back to their maternal city. The nations’ wealth accompanies them to Zion. Their animals (camels, young camels, flocks, rams) perform oddly anthropomorphic deeds: they ‘proclaim the praise of the Lord’ and ‘minister to you’. In spite of their alien provenance in nations near and far, those animals are also rendered acceptable on YHWH’s altar in a way that appears to connect with YHWH’s glorification of his ‘house’.

Lift up your eyes and look around; they all gather together, they come to you; your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms.

Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice, because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you, the wealth of the nations shall come to you.

A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the LORD.

All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to you, the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you; they shall be acceptable on my altar, and I will glorify my glorious house.

Isaiah 60:4-7 (NRSV)

The long section from verse 8 to verse 16 presents the most mixed picture of the lot. A posture of willing anticipation is likely signaled in the expression ‘the coastlands shall wait for me… to bring…’. Non-Jews are described in their complementary roles of transportation, construction, and urban enrichment. As counterpoise to the aforementioned anticipation, there appears to occur a less than comprehensive embrace of new realities on the part of the nations. For example, ‘kings shall be led in procession’, an image of military conquest by almost any light. Further, ‘the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste’. And then, the ‘descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, all who despised you shall bow at your feet; they shall call you the City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel’.

This last, complex image clearly denotes subjugation. Does it also suggest conversion from one perspective to another that is wholly new and perhaps not the product of sudden persuasion alone? I suspect that it does.

Finally, a maternal-filial metaphor merits particular scrutiny: ‘You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings’. At the risk of pressing the metaphor too rudely, it appears in the light of other quite positive maternal imagery in this book that the nursing mother that is ‘nations’ and ‘kings’ executes her maternal labors with the tenderness and even fulfillment that are so often native to the experience.

The passage in full reads as follows:

Who are these that fly like a cloud, and like doves to their windows?

For the coastlands shall wait for me, the ships of Tarshish first, to bring your children from far away, their silver and gold with them, for the name of the LORD your God, and for the Holy One of Israel, because he has glorified you.

Foreigners shall build up your walls, and their kings shall minister to you; for in my wrath I struck you down, but in my favor I have had mercy on you.

Your gates shall always be open; day and night they shall not be shut, so that nations shall bring you their wealth, with their kings led in procession.

For the nation and kingdom that will not serve you shall perish; those nations shall be utterly laid waste.

The glory of Lebanon shall come to you, the cypress, the plane, and the pine, to beautify the place of my sanctuary; and I will glorify where my feet rest.

The descendants of those who oppressed you shall come bending low to you, and all who despised you shall bow down at your feet; they shall call you the City of the LORD, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel.

Whereas you have been forsaken and hated, with no one passing through, I will make you majestic forever, a joy from age to age.

You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breasts of kings; and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob.

Isaiah 60:8-16 (NRSV)

How is one to assimilate the breadth of expression with regard to nations and kings that is gathered into this single chapter?

An interpretation that is consonant with the wider picture in the Vision of Isaiah of the peoples’ destiny and at the same time accomplishes an attentive reading of chapter sixty would seem to produce the follow conclusion: Zion’s restoration will turn the tables on the historic power relationships that have exalted some nations over Israel/Jacob. Some nations will welcome this revolution. Some will reject it. The preponderance of expression addresses the former group and suggests they will undertake their new role vis-à-vis Zion with some combination of anticipation, fulfillment, and tenderness. This vision is consonant with the Vision of Visions in Isaiah 2.1-5, though its imagery represents an alternative expression of that succinct description of the prophet’s imagined future.

Isaiah 60 is therefore a hopeful declaration for all peoples except those (few?) who will resolutely resist the divine purpose it propounds.

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the good life, enslaved (Isaiah 36)

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on August 16, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The good life is sometimes, for a moment, the pleasant lot of slaves.

The persuasive powers of Assyria’s king are in full bloom as his emissary, the Rabshakeh, argues with besieged Jerusalem. The Rabshakeh’s discourse is an extraordinarily astute and full-bodied rebuttal of everything Jerusalem’s unfortunate citizens have been schooled to believe by king and prophet.

In the midst of the Rabshakeh’s apology for Assyrian might and beneficence comes this little gem.

Do not listen to Hezekiah; for thus says the king of Assyria: ‘Make your peace with me and come out to me; then everyone of you will eat from your own vine and your own fig tree and drink water from your own cistern, until I come and take you away to a land like your own land, a land of grain and wine, a land of bread and vineyards.’

Isaiah 36:16-17 NRSV

What we know of Assyrian politics of exile throws the transparence of the king’s promise in doubt, to say the least. A tyrant who lacks omnipotence nearly always resorts to bullying. Usually, his modest but highly effective end game is simply to sow sufficient doubt that things can be any worse over there than they already are right here. Here amidst these streets whose dust we have year after year carefully tamped down, these houses we’ve scratched out of the desert, this mothy grain, these hoaky community meetings when it takes forever to get anything done, here where father and mother lie buried.

Maybe the empire’s way is not so bad…

Yet the prophet knows that slavery makes every quiet street a prison, every morsel of the tyrant’s bread a kernel of undying resentment, every comely daughter a magnet for his lust.

The biblical ethic is clear that the good life can sometimes be the experience of slaves. Its eyes-open realism was clear back in Isaiah chapter 2, where the prophet’s ironic parallelism shattered any perceived link between wealth and true religion:

Their land is filled with silver and gold, and there is no end to their treasures; their land is filled with horses, and there is no end to their chariots.

Their land is filled with idols; they bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made.

Isaiah 2:7-8 (NRSV)

There in chapter two, the people’s abjectly miserable slavery is both fueled and veiled by their prosperity. There is no true abundance there, only enslavement.

Fast forward to the book’s thirty-sixth chapter.

There is no abundance here, either, in the empty words of the Assyrian king’s lying Rabshekah.

Even if the Assyrian despot were to make good on his offer of your own vine … and fig tree after Jerusalem’s besieged daughters and sons consent to being carried away as exiles—though any well-weathered observer of imperial Realpolitik could predict he would not—shackles would still encumber Jewish hearts and minds.

One can almost hear the whispered passion in the plea of a wife to a her husband, home after a bad day at Hezekiah’s court, the curtains drawn, the children put to bed: ‘Honey, it won’t happen. We’ll be slaves there until history forgets we ever existed. They’ll make us sing Zion songs in that awful place. Here we’re free and we get by. And I know you can’t believe it any more, but YHWH might still be with us…’

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one fine day… : Isaiah 2

Posted in textures, tagged , , , on August 1, 2022| Leave a Comment »

The book called Isaiah is moored by three three weighty anchors: the Representative Summary that is chapter 1; the Generative Vision of chapter 6; and the Vision of Visions in the first five verses of chapter 2.

The Representative Summary prepares the intrepid reader of this immense work for what he or she is about to encounter. The Generative Vision is the sine qua non of the book as we have it. I find it impossible to imagine the book called Isaiah without this generative and entirely unexpected confrontation of our eventual prophet by the exalted King, high and lifted up. He thinks he will not survive the moment, yet survive he does, with a vision in his soul that he cannot shake loose.

This leaves us with the Vision of Visions in chapter 2. Read slowly, it unveils a breathtaking glimpse of a world turned on its head, an inversion of all that we assume to be true and real. Power dynamics that present themselves as unmalleable, as the very unmovable architecture of Reality, are deconstructed before our eyes. This vision depicts an impossible world, where rivers—floods of humanity, no less!—flow uphill against the always-there force of gravity to the highest place on earth, and for reasons no son or daughter of Israel could imagine finding on unwashed pagan lips.

All of this comprises or at the very least initiates the curiously introduced ‘word that Isaiah saw’. If we concede to דבר its most common meaning—a spoken and heard word—then the prophet’s Vision of Visions has already dismantled the way of things even before the text has moved from introducing that vision to narrating it. One doesn’t see a word. Yet here we are.

This will be no ordinary world, this YHWH-vision, this prophet’s imagination, this new and inviting place.

What moment does the prophet have in mind?

The answer has been much tortured by biblical translation, vulnerable as the practice is to importing anachronisms into its text. So we find, particularly in the handiwork of evangelical translators with their sometimes careless assumption of Christian eschatological systems, translations that sound like technical references. For example, in the latter days. The words work, all right, but millions of readers will immediately insert the vision into a preconfigured assumption about where history goes when God takes the wheel.

It does not belong there. The words work well enough, but the connotations are too concrete. And, therefore, misleading.

Rather, the prophet is looking beyond circumstances as we know them to an undefined future. The Hebrew expression והיה באחרית הימים, if we allow ourselves a momento of clumsy literalism, can be rendered…

Now it shall happen in the after-part of our days that…

He is simply looking ahead, this newly envisioned prophet, to a future that he himself does not claim to know.

‘Eventually’ is too loose. ‘One fine day…’ is too casual. The Jewish Publication Society’s translation may do as well as we can:

In the days to come…

The prophet does not appear to know how long his bruised people will have to endure this present darkness. Things as we know them to be. This conventional, this hopeless, this dismal time.

But he imagines that things shall not always be this way.

One day a little hill shall become the cosmos’ highest mountain, the kind of mountains where gods move amidst the clouds, the kind of place where YHWH lives. Then, strangely, nations with new-lit appetite for instruction and for peace will find a welcome there. Everything will be different.

For the moment, this is how far prophetic hope knows to reach.

Hearers and readers are invited to anchor their lives, too, in a different place and a different time in order to live well and promisingly here. Now.

But one fine day…

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