December 1998 Issue

"God grants the soul again / A season of clear shining to cheer it after rain." So wrote the English poet William Cowper. He might well have been describing Advent, a season of growing hope and gathering light. On the third Sunday the people of God light the rose candle of the Advent wreath, which calls us to rejoice.

Isaiah 35 is a poem of beauty and praise celebrating messianic peace. Yet, it cannot be understood theologically without chapter 34, which by no accident is never included in the lectionary. A savage text about the destruction of the nations, and the eternal desolation of Israel's ancient enemy Edom, it offends contemporary sensibilities, though not far removed from contemporary practice.

Many people today, advocating the ideal of peace, resist—or worse—deny the violence in human heart and history. They expunge it from scripture, ignore it in creation, and bury it in the unconscious. [The messianic peace of Isaiah 35 overcomes violence not by denying or resisting it, but by assimilating and transforming it].

No human institution has condoned, colluded with or committed more violence than the church. The crusades, the Inquisition, the Salem witch trials, and countless denominational schisms bear tragic testimony to the capacity of Christians for physical and spiritual slaughter.

Scripture illustrates the horror of violence in the name of God. The Old Testament concept of holiness included the herem, or holy ban, which often required the total destruction of clans, cities, or races of people.¹ The cursing psalms are notorious for their brutal hatred: "The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; / they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked" (Ps 58:10, NRSV). Jesus said, "I came not to bring peace but a sword" (Mt 10:34).

A coupling of destruction and victory remarkably similar to Isaiah 34-35 occurs in Revelation 18-19. The first chapter recounts the downfall of Babylon in revenge for the death of the saints; the second is a hallelujah chorus sung as the smoke goes up forever from the ravaged city. Parallel with the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19:9) is the great supper, at which the birds gorge themselves on the flesh of those killed in the apocalyptic battle (Rev 19:21).

The violence of the people of God often is a futile attempt to exterminate external reminders of internal evils. Psalms scholar Arthur Weiser states that the curse was the means by which the cultic community achieved self-purification.² Psychologically, this is projection, seeing the speck in the other's eye rather than the log in my own. The logs of human violence provide lumber for countless crosses.

We are, each of us, Boanerges, children of tumult, wrath, and thunder [IB, Vol. 1, p. 450]. Within us is the potential and often the reality of violence, the shadow of peace. To integrate that shadow we must face it and redeem its bloody energies for the cause of wholeness. If we deny or repress it, holocaust inevitably occurs.³ Sam Keen identifies the warrior as an essential component of the male psyche. Mythic images like the Valkyrie and the Amazons suggest that war belongs to women as well as men. Keen states that to guard against the shadow, we must express the warrior in moral outrage, while remaining in "perpetual repentance" for the evil within.⁴

Isaiah 35 integrates the coming of the God of vengeance and terrible recompense into the ideal of peace (v. 4). Christ entered Jerusalem not on a general's steed but on an ass, symbolic of peace. Waging peace in his own flesh he transformed the violence done to him into atonement. Isaiah depicts the peace of which Christ is the incarnation as the healing of harms in creation and a return to center.

The greening of the desert and the restoration of infirm and outcast human beings intertwine, for the messianic peace is at once both ecological and personal. God embroiders the grand tapestry of salvation with threads from the inorganic, the plant, the animal, and the human worlds. Creation is the seamless robe of God. The desert blooms, the lame leap, the blind see, springs water the dry ground. Peace that passes all understanding floods the earth.

The text moves from a vision of the messianic world to the mapping of the Holy Way for the pilgrim people of God. Barred from traveling on this road are the unclean, the lion and the ravenous beasts. All that defiles and destroys will be no more. Jesus said from the heart comes what defiles us (Mt 15:18). In the messianic age the heart of darkness will become the hushed arena in which the light shines. "Happy are those," sings the psalmist, "in whose hearts are the highways to Zion" (Ps 84:5).

In therapy I came face to face with my own hate. For months I had plumbed the depths of my story. One night, as I drove along Interstate 64 on my way to prayer meeting, my eyes began stinging with tears and my hands gripped the steering wheel in such a spasm of fury that I had to stop on the shoulder of the road until it passed. It dawned on me in that moment that I had robed the corpse of a long and hidden hate in vestments of piety. The cursing psalms gave me words to confess the darkness of my heart.

We gather in the light and beauty of Advent as people of peace. Yet, with us come also the power struggles of clergy and laity, the quarrels of wife and husband, and the resentments of children. We bring the toxic waste of our landfills, the gunfire of our streets, the injustice of our economic system, and the niceties of our theology. In the ruin of the world we reveal the wreckage of the heart. But as, in the shining darkness of the womb God became flesh, so in the conviction of the heart the God of judgment joyously made all things new.

John Hamilton

1. IB, Vol. 1, 839.

2. "The Psalms," Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), p. 88.

3. See Jim Garrison, The Darkness of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), p. 143.

4. Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly (New York: Ban tam Books, 1991), p. 167.