Wisdom and insight; counsel and might; peace and joy; unity and hospitality; knowledge and reverence; judgment and repentance are the definitive marks of the reign of God.
Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Sojourners
These are signs of God-alive – God’s way being lived, already though not yet, in the sense that we only catch glimpses and live it in moments. Obviously, it has yet to become the way of all things, the way of politics, of systems of order and organisation, of hearts and minds. This world we are living in is more like a dead stump, a wilderness.
But it is happening. There are new shoots and they drawing on more than what shows above ground. These qualities, quoted above, are being seen in down-to-earth action, everyday living, right relationships and faithfulness being the goal.
Peterson’s paraphrase speaks of brimming with knowing God-alive, of a living knowledge of God to the depths and the breadths, no limit. A living knowledge meaning it doesn’t need to use the word that many people around us can’t relate to – God. It’s known through living, through experience, through action, through simply being.
As the text pictures it, our initial reaction is likely “impossible!” Lions turning vegetarian, snakes losing their venom. A child as leader (wonder what that says to the matter raised by the Supreme Court about the voting age and of the majority response to it).
Now ideals can be a brilliant source of encouragement and purpose, but also dangerous. We can use them to moan about the world, or to escape from the world as it is, or we can put them into a glass case. Nice to look at and leave be.
What is best is to give space to the contradictions in what Isaiah pictures, because this is life surely. Never simple, often perplexing.
Here’s a thought:
Think not so much actual animals, as human beings in our context who are prey, and those who are predators. The predators and prey in our world of politics and economics; those who socially are the upside and those who are the underbelly of our society, left behind by “progress”.
Notice where Isaiah’s vision is happening already: hospitality replacing hostility and the vulnerable sitting down with the powerful, the poor with the rich together, interacting with mutual respect. It is possible.
Just one example that I saw on the news programme Te Karere: initiatives that are picking up young people who’ve got totally off track, ram-raiding and the rest, and enabling them to choose life rather than self-destruction and hurting others.
In Advent, these weeks before Christmas, we’re revisiting the anticipation and hope of this future: the poor get equal access to having their issues resolved, those who are harmed and those who do harm find peace and good purpose, and the voiceless and ignored benefit from the resources of the earth just as much as those in the centre of things. We’re re-committing to being part of this transformation. We’re preparing for Jesus’ coming, coming again and again every place where his way of turning things upside down is needed. This is how a world of conflict will become the peaceable realm.
For now, our antidote to fear is to slow down from our racing after whatever we are told we need to race after. Take time to notice the signs of God-alive. Be aware the wilderness in people’s lives, and in our own lives, and notice the signs even there.
And believe the apparently impossible.
