rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_788e882f-2f55-54c4-9ad5-32a7a91c4392">11 In Isaiah’s paradox of power, it is not the Lord who is destructive, it is humanity itself.
Verse 15, “People are bowed down, everyone is brought low, and the eyes of the haughty are humbled,” parallels both the image of a trampled vineyard (3:14) and a tree that has been reduced to its stump (6:13). In our age of concentrated wealth and power, where unlimited campaign contributions replace actual democracy and the voice of the people, where we find the same powers in denial about climate change, Isaiah’s vision of human power is timely, for it reminds us that these powers are self-destructive and cannot sustain their own reign as creation itself enters into the Lord’s judgment against humanity.
Isaiah’s paradox with nature contains the same theme of the unity of redemption between humanity and creation that is found in the prophet Hosea and in Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Hosea 4:2 Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed. 3 Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing.
Romans 8:22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
Isaiah’s unity of humanity and creation in his construct of the Lord’s judgment and redemption is what Walter Wink once described as an integral worldview where “soul permeates the universe. God is not just within me, but within everything. The universe is suffused with the divine.”12 Wink refers to this as panentheism, “where everything is in God and God in everything.”13 It is this integral worldview that we find in Isaiah that is missing in the dualistic worldview we find today in our culture where the materialistic world of the atheist is in conflict with the spiritualist world of the religious fundamentalist. It is this cultural polarity and conflict of these worldviews, neither of which is biblical, that is blinding us like ancient Israel. Wink argues that we are the first generations in the history of the world to make a conscious choice between these worldviews.14 Isaiah 7:14 and 8:18 have a name for this integral worldview—Immanuel (God-with-Us).
René Girard notes how the prophet Isaiah, Amos, and Micah all denounce the sacrificial violence that ancient Israel was practicing. These sacrifices only masked the human injustices in their nation.15 Isaiah writes in chapter 1:
11 What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. 12 When you come to appear before me, who asked this from your hand? Trample my courts no more; 13 bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation—I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity. 14 Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them.
According to Girard breaking out of the cycle of religious violence is incredibly difficult. We are in a double bind of being copied by one another, and at the same time resentful of those who copy us, for they are competing with us over the same object of desire.16 Ultimately this crisis of rivalry is released by the group on a victim, or scapegoat. What is fascinating in terms of our reading of Isaiah, the sacrificial victim or scapegoat is done purely on the basis of superstition and has no rational basis.17 Thus, Isaiah writes in 8:19 “Consult the ghosts and the familiar spirits that chirp and mutter; should not a people consult their gods, the dead on behalf of the living.”
In order to stave off the violence of mimetic rivalry, people need differentiation from one another, so as to not feel threatened by the copying of who they are. Isaiah, continuing his construct of paradox, uses sets of animals that would normally be found as foe and prey in nature, and sets them into an order guided by the Lord’s wisdom where there is no destructive violence.
8. The Gospel of Luke thus has Jesus born in a manger with animals, Luke 2:7.
9. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 46.
10. Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 9.
11. Girard, The One by Whom Scandal Comes, 31.
12. Wink, The Powers That Be, 20.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 22.
15. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 41.
16. Ibid., 147.
17. Ibid., 96.
Isaiah 11
1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. 2 The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD. 3 His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; 4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. 5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins. 6 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. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. 9 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.
Isaiah portrays unlikely pairs of animals for his human listeners to copy, thus resolving the crisis of rivalry that is caused by their being too much alike. By doing so, Isaiah is keeping the state of humility for people, depicting animals as the role model for peaceful living! It is the Spirit of the Lord’s wisdom, not mere human appearances, that this peaceful co-existing order is held together. Here social justice toward the poor is practiced. The blindness of human sight and the deafness of human hearing will not deter this one who is led by the Lord’s Spirit of wisdom. And Isaiah ends with an integral vision of all the earth being full of the knowledge of the Lord.
This is the wisdom of the Lord spoken through the prophet Isaiah. It is part of the story that comes to save us from the self-destruction we are trapped in as humans.
Joshua 6
1 Now Jericho was shut
