The Amazing Old Testament: Stump of Jesse

Isaiah 9:6 (which causes me to hear Handel’s Messiah in my head!) proclaims “His name shall be call-ed… Prince of Peace.” Thumb ahead to Isaiah 11’s shimmering, inspiring and inspired words – which Isaiah may have composed for the anointing / coronation of Hezekiah as King in 715 B.C, and for all future kings. They articulate the dream of all the ages.

“There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse” should give us pause. The family tree beginning with Jesse’s youngest son, King David, reduced to a stump? Even if (as it actually happened in history) the last survivor of David’s descendants is cut off, God will insure his plan’s not dead yet. Stumps are like that: a bald remainder, seemingly dead – but a little green shoot reaches out.

Or perhaps you know Shel Silverstein’s marvelous children’s book, The Giving Tree, the story of a tree who loves to play with a little boy who grows up, only to return and ask for apples to sell and then branches to build a house and finally the tree’s own trunk for a boat to sail away. Finally the boy, now an old man, returns. The tree tells the boy he has nothing to give; he’s just a stump now. The boy simply sits on the stump, and the tree is happy once more.

No matter what catastrophe befalls Israel, God will raise up a great, long-promised king, who will be what the others weren’t: wise, understanding, mighty; “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him… and his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.” His judgments, as verses 3-5 suggest, are godly, just. This king will insure “justice.” Isaiah deploys that rich Hebrew term mishpat, which isn’t just the good being rewarded and the bad punished. In Israel’s theology, in God’s heart, mishpat justice is when the neediest are cared for. Check out Psalm 72, a prayer used for the anointing of every king: “Give the king your mishpat, O God… May he defend the cause of the poor and give deliverance to the needy.” Do we pray this for our leaders?

And then Isaiah’s imagination (or God’s!) runs wild. A wolf living peaceably with a lamb? A cow feeding alongside a bear? A child playing over the hold of a poisonous snake? Impossible! – which may be precisely the point with this God for whom nothing is impossible. We can’t force these animals together right now without disaster striking. But God, who made them all, can muster even this kind of peace – and if wolves, lambs, cows, bears and snakes can get along, the people surely can as well.

I love the way the impossible can actually be – at least in our imaginations! And don’t say “only in the imagination.” Imagination is God’s great gift, enabling us to conceive of what we can’t achieve, but still holding it in mind and heart until God does God’s thing. That we can imagine it is illustrated by the Quaker Edwin Hicks, who painted Isaiah 11 and called it “The Peaceable Kingdom.” And he did this 62 times! – each a little different. I don’t sense he was frustrated, trying over the over to get it right; I feel sure he adored, believed in and hoped for this vision so strongly that he just kept spreading the hope and joy around.

Then there are miraculous moments when peace breaks out. A ferocious wolf was harassing the town of Gubbio until Francis of Assisi came to visit. He strode up the hill, vulnerable as a lamb. The wolf approached, snarling – until Francis made the sign of the cross and the wolf sat. Francis rebuked the wolf for sinning by frightening and eating a few people. But he said he understood why: there was no food in the hills. He offered the wolf a deal: never again to frighten the people, and they will feed you every day. The wolf lifted his paw in agreement. Francis led the wolf into town. At first the people were nervous, but they approached the wolf not with knives but bowls of porridge. The wolf became like a pet to them.

The clincher of Isaiah’s poem is “A little child shall lead them.” In Christ, God came to save us, not as a tall, muscular grownup, but as a vulnerable baby. And it’s a fair question to ask in our own world: what if we put the children in charge? Couldn’t we make peace in the world’s hot spots? Would we have hungry or homeless people? Grumpy old men have led for centuries, and look at the mess we’re in. Let a little child lead them. They know how to share toys. They find reasons to love. They hug everybody, and notice dandelions.

It’s the little shoot from the stump, the Christ-child, the Prince of Peace.