Refractions

God knows something and shares that knowledge through Isaiah: There will be a peaceable realm where the infant is safe with the adder, the lamb with the wolf, the kid with the leopard, the cow with the bear, where the lion’s a herbivore, with the whole unlikely menagerie led by a child.  It’s easy to make a connection between the peaceable realm and a child who, as an adult, will make that realm the heart of his own purpose and proclamation. It’s also easy to see in it a prediction that favours “our” part of the story as denouement, that predicts “our” Messiah. I wonder if we might rather catch, in the peaceable realm, a sense of how “the knowledge of the Lord” functions as a subversion of certainties – including religious certainties – throughout the Hebrew and Apostolic scriptures. “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.”   Having lived all my adult life in a church fighting – hurting and destroy...

       The beautiful future: You can’t get there from here As we set our first foot into the Advent landscape, we hear Isaiah utter God’s promise of the beautiful future, the future in which “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” In the promised future, “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” But when we look around, that beautiful future is not what we see. We see violence and idolatry, hot wars and cold peace, and abuse of our planet host. Frayed nerves and soft bodies and what the late John Prine called “a crooked piece of time”.  We find ourselves, that is to say, standing inside the story, standing beside Isaiah, who utters the promise of the beautiful future even as he begins a sustained account of the anger of God over the idolatry, greed, dishonesty, injustice and violence of Jerusalem, and of the approaching fury that God will level against “all that is proud a...