Sunday, November 17, 2013: Isaiah 65:17-25
In elevated, beautiful language God promises to create new heavens and a new earth. The problems and pain, the injustice and hunger, the longing and the loneliness—all will be vanquished! This image of predators and prey happily coexisting will appear again in the Isaiah text for Advent 2, and in Advent 3’s Isaiah passage there will be “no lion . . . nor ravenous beast” in God’s renewed Zion. But this week we have both: the reconciliation of predators and prey, and the vanquishing of the serpent (often the biblical archetype for the Evil Other).
This pastoral scene of predator and prey nuzzling one another is impossibly idyllic. It’s as if we’re watching a YouTube clip of animals doing preposterous cute things. We are fascinated and dismissive all at once. Our expectations, and even the laws of nature, are upended. Isn’t this a scene that belongs in fairy tales or some “over the rainbow” land? Predator politics, predator institutions, predator bosses, family members, friends, strangers—what place does Isaiah’s idyllic image of God’s promise for us have in our real world?
I like Edward Hicks’s depiction of Isaiah’s vision in his painting The Peaceable Kingdom. A Quaker minister and artist, Hicks painted animals and children throughout his life. He also mixed in images of Quakers and Native Americans meeting together peacefully. But after the great American Quaker schism of 1827, Hicks’s images were crowded with less peace and included more menacing fangs. Now he was beginning to paint reality, right?
