Isaiah 11:6-9

 

I.        When I visited Southeast Alaska in 1985, in one fishing town, I saw a poster called, “peaceable Alaska.” which captured my imagination.  I have never forgotten it.

A.       Ten years before I made my trek up to Alaska, someone else got on a steamship, leaving her home also in California. LShe traveled up the Inside Passage just as I was doing. Only I camped out on the deck of the ferry in my sleeping bag.  Rie Munoz stopped in Juneau, and fell in love with that city.  Since then she has worked as a journalist, teacher, museum curator, mother and an artist. Today Rie Munoz is easily Alaska’s most popular artist.

1.       I had to have a book of her illustrations. These are as delightful as this beautiful passage in Isaiah.

2.       In her poster, “Peaceable Alaska, Rie Munoz has expressed emotion by distortion and caricature, her use of strong colors. She captured her interest in the day-to-day activities of all Alaskans.

3.       Isaiah’s Messianic prophecy is so well illustrated by Munoz, with wild cranberry trees in the background on a dark December night up there in the Last Frontier. A caribou with a seal gull on its head is eye to eye with a red Arctic fox. Between them stands an Alaska Grizzly who has his white owl perched on his back. He is followed by the musk ox, and two Canada geese are standing off to the side watching.  Right in the middle of this unlikely gathering is a little child, his arm around the grizzly’s neck.

4.       This second Messianic prophecy inIsaiah 11 is however easily misunderstood, particularly if it is romanticized...

a.       as in the children’s Christmas song, “The Peaceable Kingdom” in which each animal sings of its gift to the baby Jesus.

b.       “The lion shall lie down with the lamb,” is a quotation and a lovely illustration you see on many Christmas cards. Those words are not found anywhere in Isaiah. 

c.       It is the wolf with the lamb, and the calf and the lion and fatling.

d.       However, I do believe C.S. Lewis in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does correctly capture the message.

 

II.       This grand vision of international peace, suggests commentator Christopher R Seitz, has its point of origin  at the holy mountain, where God’s righteous king rules with justice, He smites the earth with the rod of his mouth, and slays the wicked with the breath of his lips.” After this comes the peaceable kingdom.

A.       Thus, as is true in Luke’s Christmas story, this is not a utopian moment, but one in which the vision of peace overcomes evil after a struggle.

1.       Peace and justice, in our world, cannot exclude force and might as Isaiah 11:4 makes clear, but only on God’s holy mountain when he comes on his holy night to rule the earth and establish his Anointed One.

 

B.       The transition is abrupt, just as Christ promises his return “like a thief in the night” when we are asleep.

1.       But here Isaiah addresses those who shall return to their homeland, in the distant future, a lifetime from now, 70 more years.

a.       It is like a dream.

2.       This second exodus, this rebuilding is one that will have to withstand all kinds of attacks and trouble.

3.       The people will be held together not by their own skills and energy, but only by God’s gift of “shalom,” God’s wholeness, God’s  lovingkindness.

4.       The passage here, Isaiah 11:1-9, ends this unit in Isaiah’s prophecy.

a.       Verse 9 brings together the two parts of this captivating Messianic vision,

b.       with “a liturgical tone and cadence” that is meant for worship.

 

5.       At this point in Isaiah’s theology, it is his ultimate prophecy in the pre-exilic era, before the people are rudely and violently taken into captivity.

 

III.      The Sottish Old Testament theologian, Dr Seitz, insists that these verses must have “a fundamentally-allegorical reading.”

A.       We have a list of predatory animals lined up in opposition to indefensible, even dumb domestic animals: the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the calf! In the midst of them are two human infants, one who is still nursing, and the other just weaned playing over the den of a deadly serpent. It’s a scary image!

1.       But all this is to take place, Yahweh declares, not in normal time, for “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of Yahweh the LORD as the waters cover the sea.”

2.       These dangerous beasts each represent Israel’s worst nightmare of each  country around them:

a.       Assyria, like a lion, growls and seizes its prey; she carries it off and no one can rescue the victim (Isaiah 5:29).

b.       The Syrians on the East and Philistia on the West “devour Israel with an open mouth.

c.       Ephraim voraciously “gorges on the righteous, but still is hungry; they devoured on the left, but were not satisfied; they ate flesh of their own kind.”

3.       What a radical reversal, then is represented on God’s Holy Mountain, a total upheaval of nature, over which God’s Anointed shall rule!

a.       The dreadful devastation so well depicted in Revelation:  the beast with 7 heads and 10 horns springing from the depths of the sea; the great red dragon; the killing unleashed all over earth...

b.       All of this is conquered and ultimately ruled over by the crucified Lamb who is now alive at the right hand of God.       

4.       All hostility is not gone, but miraculously neutralized by a little child.  There is no fear, no jealousy, so that the beasts even share their food.

                                                          a.       My two cats are extremely jealous of one another. They guard their share of the bed with rigidity, one gets a pillow and the left side; the other the right side. They are very territorial, they have their own areas staked out in the living room. What is amazing is they share the feeding area in the kitchen. They each eat out of their own dish and share the water dish side by side. Go figure!

                                                          b.       In the Middle East, the Mediterranean world, before you do any business, it is the required etiquette that two adversaries sit down and share a meal.  Something happens that makes the two more amenable, more cordial.

                                                          c.       In Isaiah 11 the carnivores now eat grass and graze like a flock of sheep, exactly what the great Nebuchadnezzar was forced to do in acknowledging God’s sovereignty: eat grass like a cow.

                                                                             (i)       He is even less than a little child.

                                      5.       When Christ comes, he brings a new covenant, a radically new kingdom, none of which his fellow Jews even begin to comprehend. It is as radical and politically, socially, ecologically impossible as a wolf and a lion lying down with a lamb or a cow at the watering hole or farmyard feeding trough!

                                                          a.       “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth! But I say to you, Do not resist one who is evil...         

                                                                        b.         “You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” 

                                                          c.       Matthew 5 is full of such absurd, senseless, random acts of kindness and love!    (page 2)

                                                          d.       So then, “I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves;

                                      ...be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Lk 10:3, Mt 10.16).

                                                          e.       Jesus takes his metaphors right out of Isaiah.

                                      6.       All of creation is impacted, all creatures, vegetation, not just you and me. 

 

                   B.       Artist Edward Hicks, who died in 1849, painted probably the most famous portrait of Isaiah’s “Peaceable Kingdom.”

                                      1.       He was a rebel in his day, a colonial folk artist, self-taught, but who developed sophisticated insights and a penetrating intellect.  His fellow Quakers looked a bit sideways at his profession of painting. He tried to give it up in favor of being a farmer. When unsuccesful in farming, Edward Hicks returned to his brushes.  It broke his heart to see fellow Quakers “becoming worldly, with excessive material goods, and inflated pride.”

                                                          a.       Hick’s portrayal has a leopard, a tiger, a bear, lions and other cats, mixed in with horned domestic cattle and sheep who are sound asleep. Some of the wild animals are also asleep, the bear has his mouth wide open.  Around them are little cherubs, petting the beasts, or scratching their noses.

                                      2.       Art critic John Barostoski in the “Friends Journal,” says this of Hicks and his concepts of animal symbolism with reference to human personality:

                             a.       “The lion was quick-tempered and willful. The wolf was full of

                                       melancholy and reserved. The bear was sluggish and greedy. The

                                       leopard, buoyant. In his paintings, these were both animal

                                       qualities with potential violence as well as the aforementioned

                                       rage, egoism, greed, etc. personified.”

                                                          b.       Where does the peace come from?  What is the role of the child?

                                                          c.       It would be easy for the observer to miss, but on the left side of the painting, in miniature figures, one can discern the Indians, colonial military facing each other in a peaceful pow-wow. 

                                                          d.       Interestingly, as time went on, Edward Hicks’ successive painting of the Peaceable Kingdom become more skillful in technique, “but saturated with both hope and dashed hopes.”  Says Barostoski, the child figure plays a lesser role, divisions of the animals become more blatant, the tree more shattered, the animals begin to snarl and raise their claws....”

                                                                             (i)       Is this a realistic pessimism based on hindsight?

                                                          e.       Something important that both Munoz and Hicks missed in their portrayals is the sharing of the food together. That is crucial.

                                      3.       But Hicks believed in that special Inner Light, so unique in Quaker belief.

                             In his paintings the light becomes more gorgeously rendered as the

                             figures recede, and as the animals grow visibly older, with docility coming

                             from fatigue. The world was now all light to him, that special Light. Hicks

allows us to see the Light of our Risen Christ coming out of all beings and the world, and his last painting, his truest view of the peaceable kingdom still speaks to this light which shines within every one of us, when we receive Isaiah’s vision, his prophecy of God’s Holy Mountain.

                                      4.       In our Presbyterian Hymnal is an unusual Christmas carol, in Mandarin Chinese, dating back to 1921. (I will not try to pronounce the two compsers’ names...) 

                                                          a.       Listen to the words of the third verse –

 

                                                  “Holy night, blessed night...

                                                 Christ has come down, dwells with us.

                                                Sacrifice, love, peace, and justice,

                                                Shine upon us like the morning sun.

                                               Grace and glory bless the whole world.”  Amen.