Isaiah 11:1-10

Reflections and Questions

1. Isaiah 11:2 is part of our baptismal liturgy, in the prayer for the Spirit during the laying on of hands for confirmation. In context from Isaiah, it is spoken of the one who will represent a shoot out of the stump of Jesse. Does this image translate well as a parallel to the baptismal imagery of dying to the old self in the waters of baptism and rising to new life in Christ? God brings life out of that which appears dead. Ultimately, for Christians, isn't Christ the stump we ourselves cut down, out of whom God raised new life? And we join in that dying and rising in baptism, with an important ingredient being the gift of the same Spirit which led Christ to let himself be cut down by us, and to trust that God brings new sprouts of life out of such things.

2. What does the "spirit of wisdom and understanding..." counsel us? Does it help us, through the cross of Christ, to first of all understand that it is our violence, and not God's, which cuts down the tree? Does it help us to admit that we rely on such things, that we regularly tell ourselves that we can't live in peace without cutting someone down? Think of our current efforts to win "peace" from terrorism. Can we conceive of any other way to keep that peace than to threaten to cut someone down? And does it help us to further understand that God has taken precisely one of those trees we cut down as the vine of true life (John 15), the vine to which we might be grafted?

3. If we thought that Isaiah was wildly unrealistic last week, with his "dream" of nations ceasing to make war anymore, what do we say this week, as he broadens this dream of peace and harmony to take in virtually all of creation? The passage that is usually in the background for me with such ultimate visions for creation is Romans 8. There, St. Paul seems to indicate a certain order to things: the rest of creation is groaning for us children of God to first get our act together. But the ultimate horizon is for the whole creation to experience a rebirth. Jesus came as the first true Son of God; then, comes the rest of us children to both follow Jesus and to lead the rest of creation into living God's intended harmony. Alongside Romans 8, Isaiah 11 has always struck me as one of the most passionate passages in Scripture when it comes to the contemporary concern for creation, eco-theology. Ultimately, "the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord" (vs. 9). What is that knowledge? To use James Alison's phrase: "the intelligence of the victim" (excerpt)? In other words, the earth itself will someday be full of the same knowledge of the one who was cut down by us and raised up as a new shoot by God.

Romans 15:4-13

Reflections and Questions

1. What an incredible follow-up to the reflections on Isaiah 11 and Romans 8. St. Paul makes sure that we know that our Christian hope, which he has spoken of so eloquently in what lies before (especially chapters 5 and 8), is rooted in the Scripture, and even quotes Isaiah 11 among his examples. His emphasis in all the quotes is inclusion of the Gentiles. Do the Gentiles represent those whom the Jews themselves most often want to reduce to a stump? The Christ is, scandalously, one who is essentially both: born a Jew (of the Branch of Jesse, no less) but made unclean as a Gentile by virtue of being branded a blasphemer and executed via a Gentile means of capital punishment.

Matthew 3:1-12

Resources

1. René Girard. John the Baptist figures rather prominently in Girard's writings, especially the story of his beheading as a pre-figuring of Jesus' own fate. Yet there is also a contrast: John the Baptist entered into a relationship of scandal with Herod, whereas Jesus did not scandalize those who scapegoated him in the same way. There is a whole chapter devoted to "The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist" in The Scapegoat, pp. 125-148. He also mentions this story in the essays reprinted in The Girard Reader, pp. 196, 213-214, and in the interview there, p. 264.

2. James Alison, Raising Abel, p. 125: the contrast of John the Baptist's preaching with Jesus' is mentioned as an example of Jesus subverting the apocalyptic language and imagery and turning it into the eschatological imagination. Link to an excerpt of the section "The Apocalyptic Imagination."

3. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled. The relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus is treated in the section "Scandal" (excerpt), pp. 207-210.

4. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, sermon from December 9, 2001 (Woodside Village Church), and sermon from December 9, 2007 (Society of St. John at St. Mark's Chapel, Palo Alto).

5. James G. Williams, The Bible, Violence & the Sacred, pp. 220-221.

6. James Alison, Broken Hearts and News Creations, pp. 41-42.

Reflections and Questions

1. In verse 10, whose ax is lying at the root of the trees? Do we assume it's God's? That's the natural assumption, isn't it? It calls to mind pictures of judgment day. And that may have been what John the Baptist himself had in mind. But the Girardian angle on John the Baptist also raises the issue of the contrast between John and Jesus, a contrast which the evangelists put in the mouth of John himself, stating that the one who comes after is greater. If Jesus represents, as per Alison, a transformation of the apocalyptic into the eschatological, the major feature of which is pruning God of the violence normally attributed to him in apocalyptic, then might we reasonably ask if the ax ends up representing our human violence. The Girardian transformation of apocalyptic involves a coming to see the approaching time of violence as being about our violence, not God's. (St. Paul manifested this transformation in his reworking of the "wrath of God" in Romans; see "My Core Convictions.")

And the dominant image from the Isaian prophecy involves God's bringing new life out of a tree stump. Let's step back from John's words here for a moment and ask how Jesus fits into this picture. Isn't it our violence that cuts him down? And yet God raises out of that stump a shoot of new life, a new culture that is completely different than all those before it which have depended on cutting down someone. Yet God precisely takes that which we have cut down and raises a totally new shoot out of it. Isaiah's prophecy works not just in terms of a new branch out of the Jesse-David stump, but it works in terms of what we did to Jesus himself: we cut him down, and God raised him up. God can, and does, do these sorts of things. Matt 3:9, the verse before, calls our attention to the fact that God could even raise up children out of stones (the stone which the builders rejected?).

The problem with this interpretation, of course, is the next phrase about cutting the tree down because it does not bear fruit, which certainly implies divine judgment. Still, I would not completely back down from these questions, because we often are faced with the biblical images and language in the midst of their process of transformation. Scripture is not as shy as we might be in taking the language loaded with violence and using it to lead us to something else. Girard, for example, was initially reluctant to claim the heavily sacrificial language of Hebrews, but has since recanted. He is finding himself bolder to watch how a letter like Hebrews will take such sacrificial language as a means of leading its hearers into a transformation away from sacrifice, or, more appropriately, into a transformed kind of sacrifice: Christ's self-sacrifice to our powers of sacrifice changes sacrifice forever. Isn't that the message of Hebrews? Likewise, Christ's being cut down by us as a tree not bearing fruit is taken as the very thing that helps us to both truly see who it is who is doing the cutting, and who it is who does the bringing to life. This is the theme of the first Christian sermons recorded in Acts: we kill, God raises to life (see homepage).

2. The harvest image in verse twelve raises some quite different images. Laying an ax to a tree that is not bearing fruit is more clearly a destructive image, one of doing away with the bad. Harvest is a different sort of image in that one is primarily cutting down the wheat to make positive use of it, and the chaff is the discarded, destroyed byproduct. It still is a questionable image, however, when one considers "the stone which the builders rejected." God has the habit of taking those we discard and using them as the ones on whom to truly build. Does the harvest tend to be another apocalyptic image that the Cross means to transform? God redeems our harvesting, our efforts to pre-maturely separate the good from the bad. (Does it help to consider the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, Matthew 13:24-30, in this context?)

3. Link to a sermon that continues the themes of reflecting on being Left Behind, "Baptized into Christ Jesus: Part Two of 'Surviving the Flood.'"