The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. – Isaiah 11:6-9
…The image evokes a zoo of a fantastical kind, where no enclosures are necessary, because the wild animals (and indeed the humans) are no longer dangerous. The fierce animals of prey-the wolves, leopards, lions, and bears–will frolic, sleep, and eat with their prey–the lamb, the kind, the calf, the fatling (a word used for any animal suitable for sacrifice), child, cow, and ox–rather than eating them as they usually would. Forget your visit to the zoo where you watched a lion gorging on a hunk of meat, or the TV programs about the natural world when you watched the sadly inevitable death of a beautiful gazelle leaping across the plain. This is a vision of some kind of return to the Garden of Eden (that assumes that the animals didn’t eat each other there either), when the world will be so suffused with peace that even the natural world will eschew their gory pastimes. This vision is very clearly a vision of the far distant future, of a time way beyond the nearer catastrophe to come, and raises for us that other important theme, that Advent raises, that is what we might call “the end of the world.”
A few words on that before we turn our attention to what it means for Advent-waiting. One of the problems of calling the event “the end of the world” is that it implies an ultimate finality; that after the end it is gone…no more world. There is, I believe a bumper sticker in the United States that reads: “In case of the rapture…this car will have no driver”; the assumption being that somewhere the lives of the faithful will then be lived elsewhere, in heaven. This is not in line with the many biblical visions of a climactic event in the future when God intervenes in the world. Even the book of Revelation, which portrays the “end,” also describes a “beginning”; the new heaven and the new earth descend ready for occupation. There seems no doubt that there would, in fact, be an earthly place for bears to graze alongside cows, and for wolves to gambol with the lambs, unlikely as that may seem. If Isaiah’s prophecy is to be located in this far, far off location beyond “the end,” then there must still be a world to inhabit, however different from our own.
When Jesus ascended into heaven, the disciples were left gazing upward openmouthed, wondering where he had gone. The image of the end of the world rather encourages Christians to continue standing around with similarly vacant expressions on our faces waiting for the end to come. This does not seem to be the intention of passages such as this one in Isaiah nor is it intended to make us feel doubly bad about the state of the world now. Here on the one hand is the promise of a lion playing follow-the-leader with a child and a calf; there on the other is a lion doing what lions do now–killing said child and calf for its dinner. Visions of the end exist neither so that we all stand around training our eyes on the horizon and waiting, nor so that we can feel depressed about the state of our current world as it is, but so that we can learn to recognize signs of that new reality and to encourage their birth in our midst now. Visions of the end show us more of the world as God yearns for it it to be when all things will come to fulfillment, and to remind us that we can see flashes of that end time in our world now.
This is not to encourage us all to rush off and open wild beast training academies in which leopards are trained to curl up with goats–without taking a quick snack–but to encourage us to look out for and celebrate those times in our world when something like this happens: when white South Africans, for example, finally began to recognize black South Africans as their brothers and sisters; when, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party agreed to share power; when a mother whose child was killed forgave the killers rather than seeking revenge; when in your own life you have been able to forgive someone who as hurt you rather than give vent to your anger. These are all end-time moments, breaking into our world now.
Visions of a glorious future, such as this one in Isaiah 11, stir us into waiting but also into action. Waiting for the end times challenges us to bring about more and more of these end-time moments, and Advent is a time when we are called to reflect on where such moments might lie in our own lives, our own communities, and our own world, and also to renew our determination to bring about such world-shattering peace wherever God will is to be.
Excerpt by Paula Gooder from The Meaning is in the Waiting
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