Spades Not Swords--December 5, 2022
"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots." [Isaiah 11:1]
If somebody cuts down your tree, it's easy for your gut-reaction to be going over to his yard and cutting down one of his trees. Revenge offers fast results that way, I suppose, but you'd still have no tree--so your enemy has still "won" the day if you follow that tactic.
God, however, has a different way of dealing with the loss of a tree--God grows a new one. It's such a different kind of response than the "You-gotta-get-them-before-they-get-you" kind of thinking the world tends to operate with. The way of retaliation--of answering evil with more evil--doesn't really fix whatever was broken in the first place, even if it lets you imagine yourself as a hero doing bold and daring deeds. But to actually restore what is lost can't be done with a saw or a sword; it requires the patience of a gardener's tools to tend to a new shoot growing out of a stump.
Now, we could zoom out for a moment and consider that when Isaiah wrote this bit of poetry, he wasn't merely talking about the prize oak tree in the yard--he was using this tree and stump imagery to talk about the royal family line of old King David. David was remembered as the youngest son of Jesse, and David's line began a dynasty in the kingdom of Israel and later its southern province of Judah. For whatever good had come from David's rule [and to be certain, even "the man after God's own heart" was a pretty mixed bag in terms of his reign and character], things had mostly gone downhill in successive generations. Over and over again, kings and princes in David's line had tried to build their own little empires, marching out their armies to conquer... and often getting driven back and overwhelmed by the neighboring nations they fought with. Eventually, the bigger fish in the Mesopotamian pond started sniffing blood in the water, and they went after Israel and Judah. By the time Isaiah wrote, the kingdom that had once belonged to David was headed sooner or later to being swallowed up by one empire or another, and the hope everyone had put in David's family line was sputtering out.
It would have been easy--and awfully tempting--if you were in Isaiah's sandals, to find a scapegoat to blame for all of that decline and to point your fingers at them as "the problem." You know, to pick a foreign enemy, or a group in your own nation that made for an easy target, and just rile the people up against "THEM" as the ones we have to get rid of, because "They're the ones getting in the way of our greatness and our return to glory!" And then you go and round up all the "bad people" whom you want to blame for your problems. It's a tactic as ancient as old Pharaoh in Egypt, and it's been the playbook of ever demagogue since. And it's tempting because it presents the world in oversimplified terms: they cut down our tree [whether "they" did or not is not often clear, but it's easier to believe there's a villain with a saw rather than that you hadn't notice your own tree was dying already], and therefore we have to go cut down theirs to get even. It's offers a heroic-looking action to take--a crusade to cut down our enemies' evil trees!--that can be accomplished more or less quickly, so we can pride ourselves on getting results, too. You can imagine a prophet less faithful than Isaiah becoming the voice of warmongering and prodding the people to "take back" what they believe their enemies, real or imagined, have stolen from them. You could imagine a whole "tree-cutter" movement in ancient Judah all bent on wreaking revenge on "those people who cut down our tree first" and making them pay. And you could then imagine an endless cycle of cutting down each other's forests in never-ending volleys of vengeance until there's not so much as a tuft of crabgrass left standing. That does seem to be our tendency as a species.
Not so with the living God. As Isaiah tells it, God doesn't say to the people, "They cut down our tree, so you've got to burn down their forest!" And neither does God let the destruction of Jesse's old oak be the last word. God's defiantly hopeful protest is... a sprout. Not a zombified, propped-up rehashing of the old, but something new. God insists that death will not get the last word, that the empires of history will not stand forever, but rather there will come a new kingdom--a new reign, growing up out of the wrecked stump of Jesse's line. Christians know him by the name Jesus, and of course the reign that he brings looks very different from the empires of Assyria, Babylon, and Rome, or even David's militaristic regime. Christians see in these ancient words of Isaiah the hope of God doing something new, even out of the roots of the old. What Jesus does is not to restore the old "greatness" or "glory" of national Judah or Israel, nor does he mount a campaign of revenge against those who felled Jesse's tree in the first place. Rather Jesus is the sprout of something new...something that requires patience and tenderness to grow.
That's the thing about God's response to Jesse's fallen tree--it takes time. Revenge is fast, but regrowth requires patience. If all God wanted was a world full of stumps, that would have been easy and taken no time at all. But if God wants abundant life for us all, it will require waiting--not idle waiting, but the active nurture of a shoot growing from an old stump.
We, it turns out, are part of what God has brought into the world in all that waiting. The community of Jesus--who is the shoot that comes out of Jesse's stump--are meant to look like and live like Jesus. So as Jesus offers an alternative to the world's "You-cut-my-tree-down-so-I'll-cut-down-yours" thinking, we too, are called to live that alternative. We don't have to be ruled by needing to "get even" or to push ourselves up by pushing others down. We are invited to live by the same kind of patient love that cares for a growing sprout rather than slashing and burning the neighbor's yard in the name of vengeance. We are sent into the world, not with saws for cutting down the forests of "the enemy,' but with gardening spades to tend the soil of new trees growing up out of stumps in our mist.
We are called to practice patient love, in other words, because God practices patient love with the world.
What could that look like for us today?
Lord God, give us your kind of strength today to practice your kind of patient love in response to the world's violence and rottenness.
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