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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