Judean Exceptionalism (Christ the King; Isaiah 5:1-7; 11:1-5; November 22, 2015)

Judean Exceptionalism

Christ the King
Isaiah 5:1-7; 11:1-5

November 22, 2015

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

The biblical prophets did not have foresight; they had insight. They saw deeply, not into the future, but into their present, from the perspective of their covenant God, Yahweh. They saw how God was present, saw what God was doing, and saw God's intention as it was at work. From that they could paint an often vivid picture of what sort of future was about to unfold.

Prophets typically appeared when things had gone wrong, when the covenant people had wandered from the Torah, a word that means simply, "path," but also refers to the first five books of the Bible. Prophets, so far as we know, never appeared to say, "You're doing just fine. Everything is awesome! Keep on keeping on!"

Often this meant delivering bad news, stripping the people of their illusions, and forcing them to look into the abyss opened up by their failures to keep covenant. They were the tellers of unpleasant and even painful truths.

They stripped away false hopes. They saw false hopes as idols, as false gods that we fashion for ourselves. False hopes keep us from facing reality. False hopes keep us from seeing what God is really up to in our world. So prophets had an annoying habit of smashing false hopes as if they were so many half baked clay pots, so much bisque-ware. They did this in the interest of real hope in the true God, but still, the prophets left a lot of shattered pottery behind.

Hosea, as we saw last week, tore down false hope and offered genuine hope in the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the mid-eighth century BCE. Isaiah wrote a little later, in the latter part of the eighth century, in the Southern Kingdom of Judah.

Isaiah of Jerusalem, the son of Amoz, was a Temple priest. Living in Jerusalem and working in the Temple gave him a unique perspective on the inside workings of power in this day. Today we would say that he was a Beltway insider. He was a Jerusalem insider.

It's not that Jerusalem was all bad. The Temple was there. The Temple was the glory of Jerusalem. Yahweh dwelt there. To worship in the Temple was to enjoy the privilege of physical closeness to the place where the home of God's name was forever fixed.

The kings certainly took advantage of that closeness. After all, Jerusalem was "David's city." The kings were part of David's dynasty, the only ruling family that Judah ever had. They were quick to remind any and all that they were descended from the same David to whom Yahweh had promised a never-ending kingdom.

Yahweh became a "kept" God, the domesticated source of power for Judah and its ruling elites. It was not just that Yahweh did favor Jerusalem; Yahweh had to favor Jerusalem. Yahweh's reputation depended on Judah's fortunes. The covenant that bound Judah and Yahweh came to be understood as a covenant that bound Yahweh but left Judah free to do as it pleased.

In short, there was a kind of Judean Exceptionalism in Jerusalem at the end of the eighth century BCE. Judah was not like other nations. Judah had Yahweh. Yahweh would never fail to support Judah's king. As long as the sacrifices were made, Yahweh would never fail to support Judah. Judah could run with the big dogs of Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, and know that Yahweh had its back. The elites could exploit the masses and, for the sake of Jerusalem, Yahweh would look the other way. Judah could even hedge its bets by devoting itself to other gods and Yahweh's commitment would not vary.

Judah would stand forever because Yahweh stood with it. Whatever Judah did was right because it was Yahweh's chosen nation. The bedrock foundations of social justice could be ignored, but Yahweh would not turn his back. The elites could gather wealth at the expense of the peasant class, Jerusalem could extract wealth from the countryside, and Yahweh's love would remain unshaken. Judah was Yahweh's golden child; it could do no wrong. It could forget the covenant. It could forget its own past. It could forget what Yahweh expected of it. It wouldn't matter. Jerusalem could not be shaken; the Temple would stand for all time; David's dynasty was forever. God was on their side.

The Jerusalem elite were satisfied with this arrangement. But God was not.

And this was where Isaiah of Jerusalem came in. He could see the deep fractures in Judah's relationship with Yahweh. He could see the violence against the poor that was being built into the system. He could see the crumbled remnants of covenant integrity. And he knew that the glitter and glory of Jerusalem were built on a foundation that would not hold. Trouble for Jerusalem was coming, terrible trouble.

The image he used was the vineyard. We have a few of those in our area. Like Christmas tree farms, vineyards are labor intensive. They require enormous work to plant and continued work to maintain. No one does it just to see vines grow. They do it because they expect a harvest. They expect a vintage for every harvest season. This is something Isaiah's readers knew.

In Isaiah's telling of the story, Yahweh chose the perfect spot, cleared the ground, planted the best grape vines, built a wine vat for crushing the grapes, and a tower. I don't know what the tower was for, but Yahweh’s vineyard had one.

Yahweh expected a harvest of good grapes suitable for producing the sweet strong wine of the Judean hill country, but that never happened. The grapes were worthless. No wine came of all of Yahweh's work.

And so, says Isaiah, Yahweh intends to return the vineyard to its original condition. The protective wall will be removed. Where there were vines, there will be only weeds and thorns. Even the rain will be stopped.

The elite of Jerusalem might look out across the city and feel proud of it, of its fine homes, palaces, and its Temple, but Isaiah redraws this landscape as containing only empty wasteland. Judah has been a deep disappointment.

Yahweh wanted justice and righteousness; Yahweh wanted a community of justice, peace and humanity. Instead, Yahweh got the blood and tears of the poor. Instead of a land of shared well-being, Yahweh goes on to complain that the rich have used their wealth and power to become even more wealthy and powerful. The small fields and houses of the people of the land are gone. The fields have been joined together. The little houses have been torn down and fine homes have been built in their place. And now the countryside is empty.

Judah cannot sustain the lie that it is living. A reckoning will come. Judah's future has been foreclosed. Jerusalem lives its dazzling life in the shadow of doom. No nation that favors its own powerful and privileged classes, that despises its own poor and fails to hear their cries has God as its protector. It does not matter whether its leader invokes God at the end of every public address. It does not matter what it inscribes on its coins and its currency. It does not matter whether that nation is us or God's chosen people of Judah.

To change metaphors, the Kingdom of Judah is a majestic tree with a rotten core. Its trunk is impressive, but it is hollow. In the coming storm this tree will come down and all that will be left is a sad and pitiful stump. Jerusalem will fall; Judah will fall; the House of David fall.

You can imagine how well this message was received in the Temple. You can imagine how well this message went over with Isaiah's Pastor-Parish Relations Committee, his District Superintendent, and his Bishop.

But, you see, one thing about trees is that they are hard to kill. If you cut down a tree and wait, pretty soon you will see a fresh shoot, a tree's attempt to begin again, new life's persistent attempt to live.

The coming desolation of Jerusalem will not be Yahweh's last word. There will be a new day for Judah, a new day for Jerusalem, and, above all, a new day for the House of David. Jesse's stump--remember that Jesse was David's father, so Jesse's stump is the shattered House of David--Jesse's stump will send up new shoots. David's House will have another chance.

And this time David's son will get it right. He will use his power to help the poor. He will pass sentence on the wicked rich. And after justice will come peace, peace unlike anything that has ever been seen: the wolf and the lamb will lie down together, the cow and the bear will graze together. Even Israel and Judah will be reconciled and all of Israel's exiles will be gathered together and brought home.

Poetic excess? Maybe. But they lived and we live in a time for poetic excess, a time for the truths only the poet can utter. It is time for poet-prophets to strip away our illusions, to show us the future that must unfold from the present we have chosen, and to do this in ways that are evocative and inescapable.

It is a time for bad news: bad news from Paris and Beirut and Baghdad, bad news from Ferguson and Baltimore and Houston, bad news from the Arctic Circle and the coral reefs and the salt-water marshes. It is time for our illusions to be stripped away, our illusions of American privilege, or white privilege, or straight privilege, or middle-class privilege, or whatever we imagine it is that will protect us from the future unfolding from our present. It is time for us to know that the walls that have protected us will not stand against the coming tsunami. It is time for us to mourn the lost world. It is time to chose whether we will survive as a just, peaceful, and humane community or whether in the crises that come we will each struggle to be the strongest and most ruthless in a struggle in which only the strong and ruthless survive. It is time for covenant faithfulness to rise to the top. It time for the poet-prophets to tell us all that.

Then, after all that, we need to hear what the poet says next, because the poet is not finished. We need to let the poet paint a picture with words of the world that is coming from God's hand. It will be a world of justice. It will be a world of peace. It will be a world in which no child dies for lack of food, a world in which no young men and women set out to kill other young men and women for the sake of flags and slogans. It will be a world in which those who incite others to fear and hate will be universally denounced as scoundrels, a world in which the old will see their children's children's children grown. In short it will be a world in which each of us will sit under our own fig tree, eat from our own vines, and forget what fear is like.

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