A reflection on Isaiah 11:1–10 for Tuesday of the 1st Week of Advent.
Those Advent pictures of the wolf beside the lamb always leave me wondering about the lamb. Isaiah says it will be safe. I want to know what has happened to the wolf.
Then I come to the lion eating straw. That is a considerable change of diet. Isaiah imagines the lion being fed without another animal having to die. The lamb can lie down because it will no longer be eaten.
I have sometimes pictured the peaceable kingdom as familiar animals behaving unusually well. Reading it more closely, I find a creation whose ordinary workings have changed. The bear grazes beside the cow. Their young lie down together. A child can put a hand near a snake’s den. I would still be reaching for the child, which says something about how thoroughly I expect danger to belong to the world.
The animals eating plants remind me of Genesis 1, where God gives them green plants for food. I do not read either passage as a lesson in zoology, but I am reluctant to reduce the animals to illustrations of human behaviour. They receive something in this promise too.
This vision goes beyond my own human concerns. I often think about people going to heaven while the earth carries on, or eventually wears out. Yet Scripture keeps giving us an earth that matters to God. In Advent, the Church reads this promise while awaiting Christ. His coming concerns the creatures that cannot understand a sermon as well as those of us who can.
I cannot explain how a lion could live this way. But I am reluctant to leave it out of Christian hope simply because I cannot picture the arrangements. Isaiah has given the animals quite a lot of space in a passage we read while waiting for Christ.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, I struggle to imagine the peace Isaiah describes. Help me care for the living world while I await your coming. Let my hope make room for the creatures you have made and the earth that sustains them. Amen.
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