The Jewish magazine Moment asked a number of Jewish writers, professors, rabbis,
artists, and actors the following question: “What does the concept of the
Messiah mean today?” Rabbi Peter H.
Schweitzer responded: “Years ago, a popular evangelical bumper sticker
read, ‘I found it.’ The Jewish version would read, ‘I’m still looking for it.’”
There was also a Jewish bumper sticker
back in the 1970s saying: “We never lost it!”
There are many different ideas among
Jewish people today about the Messiah. The prophet Isaiah, living 2700 years
ago, was one among many Hebrew writers to talk about the Messiah. Let us listen
to what he has to say from Isaiah 11:1-10….
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his
mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the
wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
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.
On that day the root of
Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him,
and his dwelling shall be glorious.
This passage is all about The Hope of the Messiah, the Advent Hope. Furthermore, in this
passage Isaiah tells us three major things about the coming Messiah. He tells
us something about the Messiah’s fitness to rule, something about the character
of his rule, and thirdly he tells us something about the result of his rule.
First, let us look at
the Messiah’s fitness to rule in verses one through three.
Isaiah prophesies that
the Messiah to come will be fit to rule for three reasons. First, he will be
fit to rule because he will be like a shoot out of the stump of Jesse. The
Messiah will be the rightful heir of King David. However, he will also be of
humble origin; he will bypass all the ostentation of the Davidic house as it
subsequently developed.
This image “a shoot out of the stump of Jesse” is an
interesting one. As we saw last week, King Ahaz brought disaster on the
southern kingdom of Judah because he chose to trust in a man, Tiglath Pileser,
rather than trust in the Lord. However, as Deborah J. Winters points out, “God
gives Judah the assurance that total destruction, seen in the imagery of a
clear-cut forest with only tree stumps remaining, will not be the last word.
God always has the last word and it is one of hope.” New life will grow from
the stump of Jesse, the new life of the Messiah.
Matthew and Luke write much about this new life. They are at
pains to point out that Jesus is the one who brings this new life to us; Jesus was
indeed a descendant of King David. However, the Gospels also show Jesus as one
of humble origin. He is, first, a carpenter’s son, from Galilee, and then a
traveling preacher, dependent upon his heavenly Father, and the kindness of
strangers, for his daily sustenance.
Followers of Jesus have the same marks as their master. They
are a royal priesthood, but they are also a humble people.
It is said that Queen Victoria, who
reigned over England for over 63 years said, “I wish Jesus would come back in
my lifetime. I would lay my crown at his feet.”[1]
That is what each of us need to do every day. Rather than be kings and queens
of our own lives, we need to lay our crowns at the feet of the only one who has
the right to rule our lives: King Jesus.
The second reason
Isaiah says the Messiah will be fit to rule is because he will be endowed with
the Spirit, giving him true wisdom, grounded in the fear of the Lord.
Isaiah draws a contrast between the Messiah to come and the current kings of
his age who, like Ahaz, have a false wisdom arising from a fear of men rather
than God (7:2).
Cornelius Plantinga once wrote,
[Part] of the equipment we need for life
in a secular setting is the ability to discern spirits. It takes advanced
Christian training to learn to tell the difference between, say, patriotism and
chauvinism, between piety that is superficial and piety that is profound,
between the mind of humanism and the mind of Christ. Trying to do this in a
secular college is like trying to diet at Kentucky Fried Chicken.[2]
Our contemporary culture does not really offer us much in
the way of wisdom. Lots of information, yes, but little if any wisdom is on
offer. For wisdom, we must turn to the one on whom the Spirit rests, King
Jesus.
The third reason
Isaiah says the Messiah will be fit to rule is because: “his delight shall be
in the fear of the Lord”. N. T. Wright points out that the Hebrew word for
“delight” actually means “smell”.
This may be just a metaphor, borrowed
perhaps from the cultic contexts in which God delights in the pleasing odour of
sacrifices, but the reason for taking it thus is our modern, Western
downgrading of the sense of smell as the most accurate judge of situations and
people. It may sound absurd to us, but to this day in several cultures there
are people who stand at the doors of churches, and for that matter mosques, and
refuse people admission on the grounds that they carry with them a scent of
evil. Some animals, of course, can arrive at accurate judgements of people on
similar grounds.
The point of this surprising comment in
Isaiah is that the Messiah, when he comes, will judge with fine-honed accuracy.
Eyes may deceive; ears may listen to powerful voices; but the Messiah’s justice
will have a sense of smell, attuned by the fear of the Lord, through which
wickedness will be identified and dealt with. Out of this sharp-edged
judgement, cutting through the fuzzy half-truths with which so much of our
human discourse is saturated, will come the time of peace, of harmony, of
wolves lying down with lambs, of the earth being full of the knowledge of the
Lord as the waters cover the sea.
The second major
thing Isaiah tells us about the Messiah in this passage is something about the
character of his rule in verses three through five.
The fundamental characteristic of the rule of the Messiah
will be righteousness. The manner in which this will be manifested is in
justice for the poor and the meek. Again, Isaiah draws a contrast with the
current kings of his day who failed to provide justice (3:12-15).
The Messiah, again by contrast, will be able to provide
perfect justice because of his perfect knowledge, a perfect smell of what is
right, as N. T. Wright has pointed out for us.
There is a strong suggestion in this, and in the power of
the Messiah’s word, that he will be more than an ordinary mortal. There is
something of the air and the smell of the divine about him.
In his book, Simply Christian, N. T. Wright begins his chapter entitled “Putting
the World to Rights” with the following personal story:
I had a dream the other night, a powerful
and interesting dream. And the really frustrating thing is that I can’t
remember what it was about. I had a flash of it as I woke up, enough to make me
think how extraordinary and meaningful it was; and then it was gone…. Our
passion for justice often seems like that. We dream the dream of justice. We
glimpse, for a moment, a world at one, a world put to rights, a world where
things work out, where societies function fairly and efficiently…. and then we
wake up and come back to reality.
According to Wright, our longing for
justice “comes with the kit of being human.” Unfortunately, although we all
strive for justice, we often fail to achieve it. As Wright says,
You fall off your bicycle and break your
leg. You go to the hospital and they fix it. You stagger around on crutches for
awhile. Then, rather gingerly, you start to walk normally again…. There is such
a thing as putting something to rights, as in fixing it, as getting it back on
track. You can fix a broken leg, a broken toy, a broken television. So why can’t
we fix injustice. It isn’t for lack of trying.
And yet, in spite of failures to fix
injustice, we keep dreaming that one day all broken things will be set right.
Wright contends, “Christians believe this is so because all humans have heard,
deep within themselves, the echo of a voice which calls us to live [with a
dream for justice]. And [followers of Christ] believe that in Jesus that voice
became human and did what had to be done to bring it about.”[3]
The third major thing
Isaiah tells us about the Messiah in this passage is something about the ideal
state of affairs that will result from the Messiah’s rule in verses six through
ten.
The effect of the rule of the Messiah will be, as we saw
last week, universal peace. Isaiah’s language recalls the paradise of Eden. The
entire creation will be set to rights. The whole earth, not merely Jerusalem or
Zion, will become the Lord’s holy mountain. The Messiah’s reign will be
experienced everywhere. Isaiah looks beyond the disappointments of his own time
to the coming of an ideal state of affairs that we now know will only be
realized with the Second Coming of Christ. We are given a more complete picture
of the coming glorious dwelling of the Messiah at the end of the book of
Revelation.
However, as I pointed out last week, the Messiah’s universal
rule of peace is not simply something we should hope for in the future, it is
also something we need to work toward now. Deborah Winter asks some very
pertinent questions in this regard:
Can Jews and Palestinians learn to live
together? Can Muslims and Christians and Jews coexist free of hatred? Or
persons of faith and atheists? Or, heaven forbid, spouses and their in-laws?
Can any two groups of people who traditionally can’t stand each other really
learn to live together in peace?
That is Isaiah’s vision. That is the
vision that Jesus lived out on this earth. That is the vision Jesus wants his
church to be known by.
Deborah Winter finds it interesting that the same vision of
hope is evoked in our cultural Christmas stories told at this time of year. In
the television program, Rudolf the
Red-Nosed Reindeer, the dreaded abominable snowman is ready to eat Rudolf
and his parents. However, with the help of the misfit elf dentist, Hermey, the
abominable snowman chooses friendship, and he uses his gift of height to help
rather than harm others when he puts the star atop the community Christmas
tree.
Deborah Winter concludes that if even the cultural Christmas
stories we tell our children convey something of the hope of Advent, then
maybe, as we follow the little child who came as Prince of Peace, his vision of
peace and hope can be realized in our church and in our world.
[3] N. T. Wright, Simply Christian (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), pages 3-13, retrieved from http://preachingtoday.com
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