When That Day Comes
Isaiah 7:10-25
“When that
day comes..”
Wow…. Just, Wow!
I’ve been through almost every translation available to me,
including one from the Hebrew.
I feel a synopsis is required:
God tells a
king to ask for a sign, and the sycophantic king, being mealy-mouthed and
fawning, says, “Oh no, I wouldn’t dare presume to ask the great God for a
sign!” The prophet gets all wound up then, and says this: “Well, if you’re
going to be like that, I’ll talk to all
of your people!”—
“Is irritating everyone around you not enough, that you
feel like you have to irritate my God too? Then God will give you a sign in his own good
time! A young women will get pregnant
and give birth to a son and name him God-with-Us. He’ll eat cottage cheese and honey in order to
learn how to reject in evil and choose in good. Before he knows how to reject in evil and
choose in good, this land that infuriates all of you will be completely
abandoned by both her rulers. Then God
will bring down upon you days like you’ve never seen! Times will be worse for you than when Ephraim
broke away from Judah. When that day
comes, God will whistle for the gadfly from one invader and for the wasp from
another conqueror: they will come, all of them, and settle everywhere— in the
empty valleys and the holes in the rocks; in the brambles and all over the
creeks and washes. At the same time, God
will shave you bare—with a razor rented from a tyrant—your head, your genitals
and even your beard, and you’ll be utterly exposed and humiliated. In that day someone will manage to keep alive
a heifer and two ewes, and from their milk the remnant of people left in the
land will have to stay alive on nothing but cottage cheese and wild honey. Even worse, wherever there were grapevines—vineyards
worth a fortune!—there will be only weeds and pricker bushes left. No-one but hunters will go there to stalk rabbits
and prairie dogs in the scrub-brush. Those
sad hills— where you can still see what’s left of plowed land, and the marks of
digging and planting—they’ll be nothing but poor forage for cattle and sheep,
and you won’t dare go out there for fear of the cactus and the thorns.”
I
just can’t help myself. What if I told that story like this?—
God
said to the President, “Ask me for a sign!” and the President said, “Oh no, I
wouldn’t feel right doing that and I wouldn’t want you to think I was taking
advantage of you!” Then all the media and reporters started to say this:
“Is
aggravating everyone around you not enough, that you have to offend against the
very nature of reality as well? Obviously you are too ignorant to understand!
Well, if you are going to be like that, we’ll talk as loud as we can to all the
people about what is going to happen if we don’t do something soon! Have you
even noticed that it’ll be Christmas
soon, when a baby will be born who is God-with-Us? He’ll know how to tell good from evil, and
maybe if we listen we can even learn how to do that ourselves: if we can only
stop stuffing our faces with fast food, and burning our future up with
petroleum and coal, and filling the world with our plastic trash; if we can
only learn in time how to go about living sustainably. We probably won’t learn, though, until the
infuriating politics of this country ends up with all of us being abandoned by
Republicans and Democrats alike! Then the Inevitable will happen, and it will
be worse than the Great Depression. When that day comes, hatred and hostility
from the Conservatives will settle like flies over every kind and considerate
act and smother it; while petty distractions and idealistic notions from the
Liberals will swarm like wasps over every practical consideration that presents
any kind of difficulty and sting it to death. While all of that is happening,
we as a nation will be ridiculed— as though we’d been shaved bare— naked and
humiliated before the whole world because of our own foolish choices! But we’re not going to give up. We are going
to manage to hang on to something, even if it isn’t quite enough. Maybe it will be a solar city, or a couple of
wind-farms, but one way or another there will be people who survive. Maybe we
won’t have enough to eat, maybe we’ll have to live rough without all the
luxuries we’ve gotten used to, but there will be something left to salvage.
It’ll get a lot worse though, before it’s over! Huge tracts of farmland—worth
millions of dollars— will be abandoned, and turn into fields of weeds and
thorns. Hundreds of golf courses will be left un-watered, invaded by cactus and
coyotes; places where only scavengers go. All those sad parks and shopping
malls will be filled with sand and dust, with homeless people camped under dead
trees and sleeping in abandoned shops. The old, comfortable world will become a
place to be afraid in, and you won’t like living there.”
I
have to say, my own paraphrase made me feel uncomfortable. I mean, comparing
the media and news services to a prophet of God? What was I thinking? But then
I thought, it ought to make us
uncomfortable! It won’t do us any good at all to read the Bible as if it was
only pertinent to ancient times in far-off places. It was only when I started
asking myself, “What’s the metaphor here?” that meaning really started to seep
through the cracks.
In
my mind, it was then that a sycophantic king turned into a narcissistic
president—a prophet became a thousand news outlets—God came to stand for all of
Nature—the celebration of Christmas stood for an opportunity for us to re-learn
how to refuse in the midst of Evil and make our choices out of the heart of
Goodness—cottage cheese signified food grown sustainably—wild honey symbolized
meat and fish harvested mindfully—“the kings we fear” morphed into political
parties that will abandon us—‘Ephraim and Judah’ became a simile for a disaster
like the Great Depression—predatory powers like swarms of biting insects became
Conservative and Liberal political ideologies—God using a razor borrowed from a
king to shave us bare was an apt parallel for the humiliating actions of all
our branches of government—the heifer and two ewes became a solar city and a
couple of wind-farms—abandoned vineyards equaled mega-farms and golf courses worth
millions—the cultivated hills gone to waste became sad parks and shopping
malls—foraging cattle and sheep became homeless people scavenging in the
ruins—and the last line didn’t really need to be changed at all:
“It will be a world to be afraid of,
and one we’d rather not live in.”
The
thing is, this passage is not a message of despair, or meant to leave us
discouraged and hopeless. The message is this: We’ve always screwed up; we’ve
always aggravated God and each other; we’ve always inflicted misery and
disaster on one another, and still God was born into the world and lives on in
us.
That’s
the reason we won’t give up.
That’s
the reason we know, somewhere deep down inside,
what
it means to say “No” in the midst of
evil,
and
“Yes” from out of the very center of
all Good.
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