The wolf and the lamb shall feed together

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Isaiah 65:17-25 and Luke 21:5-19

As we move now closer to the season of Advent, you’ll notice that the Gospel readings become more intense, cautionary, and demanding. We’ll see that pattern extend into Advent—and specifically into its first couple of weeks—first when an adult Jesus is very much in view, coming with words similar to the ones we hear tonight, and then when John the Baptist appears with his dire warnings. And yet it will move toward the stories of Annunciation and the Nativity, with their very different tones of deep hopefulness. We’ll get there.

For tonight, though, we have this intense and cautionary message spoken by Jesus in the days just prior to his arrest. There are words about the temple being thrown down, of “wars and insurrections” and even “dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” And then there are those words about arrests and persecutions coming for those who continue to follow the Jesus way, which might well have left his little band of disciples more than a little confused, worried, unsure.

What is interesting here is that the Lectionary has matched this urgent Gospel story with an extraordinarily generous and hope filled reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah. Christians often too easily imagine that the Old Testament is filled with fire and toughness while the New Testament is all hope and generosity, that that’s a very thin way for us to think about our scriptures.

Sure, many of the prophets and many of the stories from the Hebrew scriptures place an enormous emphasis on the need to scrupulously follow the torah, and on what it costs Israel when it neglects to do that. But then shining through are these sorts of teachings that seem to transcend anyone’s ability to be in complete fidelity to torah, and instead dares to imagine a coming time when the law will be written on our hearts. In the words of Jeremiah, that prophet who could be the crankiest of all:

But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (Jeremiah 31:33)

And so here from the book of Isaiah we have this extraordinary set of images for how things should be and—in the fullness of time—shall be. Listen to these phrases, and just let them sink in a bit:

• No more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.

• No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;

• They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

• The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox;

And perhaps most strikingly, the lines with which our reading began:

For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

Former things shall not be remembered or come to mind… and that is Isaiah offering to us God’s perspective! God will not remember the old failings, the old sins. God will offer a clean slate, not even letting the old foibles and failings “come to mind.” It is an extraordinary text, full of the deepest of hopes for a people.

“This poet [Isaiah], writes Walter Bruggemann, “knows that God’s coming newness is not contained within our present notions of the possible… What this poet imagines for his treasured city, the subsequent people of faith have regularly entertained as a promise over every failed city. Here the old city is submitted to the wonder of the creator, the one who makes all things new.”

Isaiah, of course, holds this dream and vision out for a renewed or remade Jerusalem, yet several hundred years after he uttered these bold words, we find Jesus in that same city, standing at the temple that had been rebuilt after the temple Isaiah knew so well had been destroyed by the Babylonian army in the year 587 BCE. And Jesus is saying that this second temple—built as the people returned from the Babylonian exile and then rather grandly enhanced and rebuilt under Herod’s directions in the decades before Jesus was born—was going to be destroyed. “Not one stone will be left upon another.” Which is what happened in the year 70, when the Empire marched in its armies and took Jerusalem to pieces in response to uprisings and rebellions by its citizens.

Jesus knows that this old way of being Israel, this old way of thinking about Jerusalem and its grand temple, simply will not hold. The old way served the people well enough in its time, but in Christ it has been born a new way. As he says in the Gospel according to John right at the moment where he has just driven out the merchants and money-changers, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” on which John then comments, “he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

The transition from the old to the new and the very emergence of the new, right in the midst of the brutal Roman empire, will not be easy he’s saying to them.

[T]hey will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name.

You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name.

And all of these things in fact came to be within a generation of Jesus’ death and resurrection. With the rise of the Emperor Nero to the throne, the persecutions of Christians began to reach a point of perverse absurdity. Persecutions under the Empire would continue in waves right through to the year 313, when the Emperor Constantine instituted the Edict of Milan, making Christianity a legal and acceptable faith within the Empire.

Yet while these words of Jesus have a very particular applicability to those ancient times, as N.T. Wright insists, they “have a good deal to say to the subsequent church as well.”

Wherever Christians are persecuted for their faith, they need not only the prayers and support of their fellow believers in more fortunate places, but also the comfort and encouragement of these words: ‘Don’t let anyone deceive you’; ‘a chance to tell your story’; ‘I’ll give you wisdom’; ‘you’ll keep your lives through patience.’ These are still precious promises, to be learnt ahead of time and clung to in the moment of need. (Luke for Everyone, p. 253)

And we hold with that Isaiah’s bold dream of a time when “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” God’s peaceable kingdom, of which we catch glimpses in our own lives, our own relationships, our own communities, and sometimes even our own cities.

May God bring about the peaceable kingdom, to a world that so often fails to dream of peace.