December 5, 2010 | 8:00 a.m.

In the Meantime

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 72:1–7, 18–19
Isaiah 11:1–10
Matthew 3:1–12

We are people grown weary of waiting.
We dwell in the midst of cynical people,
and we have settled for what we can control.
We do know that you hold initiative for our lives,
that your love planned our salvation
before we saw the light of day.
And so we wait your coming.

Walter Brueggemann
Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth

Every Advent, we can count on having an encounter with John the Baptist. No matter which of the four Gospel accounts the lectionary follows, John the Baptist appears as a herald of what is to come. Whereas only two of the Gospels include an infancy narrative of Jesus, all four Gospels introduce the story of Jesus’ life with an account of John the Baptist, and from this fact, we can safely conclude that when word about Jesus spread throughout the region, Jesus entered a scene that John the Baptist had already set.

John was already famous for the baptism that he preached and for the Messiah that he expected. He was well known for the urgency with which he exhorted people to repent and the imminence with which he expected the Messiah’s appearance. He was the quintessential prophet of his day.

It is clear that Matthew, like the other Gospel writers, understood who Jesus was and what Jesus accomplished within the context of Israel’s prophetic tradition. Matthew even goes beyond the other Gospel writers in ascribing the same message to both John the Baptist and Jesus. In fact, at different times in the Gospel, both of them use the very same words: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This message sounds more like something we would expect from the book of Revelation rather than from the beginning of the Gospels, and it may seem out of place to hear it now, on the second Sunday of Advent, when we are joyously awaiting the birth of Jesus rather than anxiously worried about the end of the world. But we would be making a mistake to ignore the eschatological alarm ringing from the start of the Gospels.

There is nothing like a little eschatological reference to awaken us from our sentimental slumber in the Christmas season. Eschatology is the study of the end of time, which, in the prophetic tradition, is often accompanied by God’s final judgment. John the Baptist stands in a long line of prophets, including Isaiah, from whom he and all of Israel inherited a prophetic tradition that was rich in eschatological symbolism and imagery.

The tradition, however, isn’t wholly frightening. Equally astounding is its message of hope. The contrast couldn’t be greater. For instance, in the chapter preceding the passage we heard this morning, God makes known the destruction he plans for Israel. Guilty of statutes that oppress the vulnerable and rob the poor, that take advantage of widows and prey upon orphans, Israel will not escape complete calamity on the day of God’s judgment. So complete is Israel’s destruction that the prophet portrays the royal house of David, stemming from the root of Jesse, as deforested and reduced to thorns and briars. Left gasping at the prophet’s words of destruction, the listener is stunned when, in the very next chapter, the chapter from which we read today, the prophet relays a new message of hope: in the very first verse of chapter 11, the prophet writes, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse.” Who would have thought possible the growth of anything from a stump?

Ultimately, the prophet relays a euphoric vision of peace and harmony at the end of time:

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 serpent,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.

This eschatological image has come to be known as “the peaceable kingdom. In this vision, creation is so transformed that species that, since the beginning of time, have been at war with each other are now lying down together, grazing together, with no threat of being preyed upon and devoured.

The image is so radical and stunning that throughout history it has gripped the human imagination. It has made its way into works of art, literature, and, I must point out, even the 1984 film Ghostbusters, in which Dr. Peter Venkman, a character played by Bill Murray, and his team are trying to convince the mayor of New York that the “city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.” When the mayor suspiciously asks, “What do you mean, ‘biblical?’” another ghostbuster says, “What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff. Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!” A third ghostbuster says, “Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes.” Another ghostbuster adds, “The dead rising from the grave,” and then Dr. Peter Venkman completes the description, “Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.” Even in this comedic catalogue of Old Testament-inspired punishments from God is this bizarre aberration of nature in which historically antagonistic species are able to coexist peaceably.

On a more serious note, the peaceable kingdom is an image so powerful that it has inspired ecological readings of the Bible, social and political commentary, and civil rights activism. Well known to the world is the speech given by theologian, preacher, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. in which the dream envisioned by King is inspired and analogous to the vision of the prophet Isaiah. “I have a dream,” he wrote, “that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood” (I Have a Dream, p. 104). In King’s dream, the red hills of Georgia would come to resemble the holy mountain of the Lord, and there persons who never before would have sat together at a common table would coexist, neither hurting nor destroying one another.

“I have a dream,” he wrote, “that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, that one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers” (p. 105). The dream that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned taps into the political conviction that has run deeply throughout ancient Israel’s history, especially Israel’s prophetic tradition. So deep is this conviction that Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann calls it “primal.” It is the conviction that the government is to “intervene on behalf of the poor and the vulnerable who are unable to supply their own social leverage” (Isaiah 1-39, Westminster Bible Companion, p. 100).

King’s speech was delivered in 1963, and there is no doubt that over the past fifty-plus years his dream has continued not only to make a difference for individuals in their personal relationships, but also for society. Although we are still far from the social ideal that he envisioned, the vision that two generations ago would have been unthinkable is day by day becoming realized.

Therein lies the power of eschatological vision. In her scholarship on the role of eschatology in Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts, New Testament scholar Adela Collins has explained that eschatological visions, like the peaceable kingdom, are intended to influence the behavior of the audience. No matter how unrealistic or bizarre such visions are, changing our behaviors is one of their main functions. The prophets of Israel knew this. Isaiah knew this, and John the Baptist knew this. Whether the vision is one of God’s wrath or of God’s promise, it urges us to act accordingly. If eschatological visions are going to have revelatory power over us, we will need to be changed by them.

The change required, however, is not just on a personal level. The repentance preached by John the Baptist, and in later texts by Jesus himself, demands more than our private efforts to transform our personal lives. Instead, it involves the transformation of the whole world. Christ is coming, the prophetic tradition reminds us, not for our personal salvation only, but for the salvation of the world in all its political, economic, social, and natural dimensions.

It may indeed seem out of place to hear such an eschatological message in this season of Advent. And yet the church has always made sense of who Jesus Christ was and what he would accomplish in the context of Israel’s prophetic tradition. Preparing the way, John the Baptist made both early Christians and us aware that Jesus was the Messiah whom we should await with great joy. However, he also reminds us that the first Christmas was not just when a little baby was born, but also a moment to reconsider how we live our lives and how we can work to bring about the kingdom of God, the peaceable kingdom, in our world. In the meantime, we live between two Advents.