There's a Better Way to Understand Isaiah than to Think He Predicted Jesus
(Note: This blog is posted on the first Sunday of Advent 2016. May the season bring us to think deeply about living the Earth-size worldview of Jesus.)
For many people and species, this Christmas season of 2016 is a struggle against ecological, political, and economic darkness. A U.S. Trump presidency brings an ominous lack of regard and understanding to ecological and civilizational crises we face. So do transnational corporations roaming the globe for greater profits through trade agreements skewed in their favor instead of ecology and labor. In the same vein, industrialized agriculture mistreats soil and animals while producing inferior food rather than being intent on producing the healthiest food and soil possible. Many billionaires and multi-millionaires are more intent on tax cuts on their wealth than love for Earth and all her inhabitants. And too many are responding to human immigration by wanting to restrict it with walls and zealous nationalism rather than seeing its opportunities for a human community made stronger in diversity.
Today, the words Isaiah spoke to the people of Judea in the 8th century BCE—words often heard in our Christmas seasons—sound as encouraging as they doubtless did then:
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined. (Isaiah, chapter 9)
When Isaiah first delivered this hope so poetically, the people of Judea, were frightened. Ahaz was king, but having great difficulty maintaining his kingdom in the face of Assyria’s intent to expand its empire. Since Assyria had already invaded, defeated, and taken over the Northern Monarchy of Israelites, the people of Judea (the Southern Monarchy’s Judahites) could not help but worry that Assyria would take them over too. Why would Assyria stop?
Ahaz had already made a radical concession, he’d built an altar to Ashur, the Assyrian chief deity, in the Jerusalem temple and given considerable amounts of the temple treasury to the Assyrian king, Tiglath-Pileser. Plus, when the Northern Monarchy of Israel fell, many of its inhabitants had migrated to the Judahite South. They brought with them different religious and royal traditions, all challenging Ahaz’s efforts to bring a united spirit across his realm.
Under the daily weight of this political, economic, and spiritual darkness, people welcomed encouraging words. And, if they came from Isaiah, so much the better. Isaiah was an advisor to King Ahaz and a respected prophet, a seer of things as they are and as they could be—at least in the minds of many. So when Isaiah said that he saw a breakthrough ahead, people were comforted.
The breakthrough Isaiah anticipated was linked to the royal family’s young son. So Isaiah’s words made King Ahaz proud. As Isaiah analyzed the current situation, the King’s son, Hezekiah, would find a way to renew the influence of Judah’s monarchy; it would be stronger and better in the near future. Isaiah spoke boldly about the future when Hezekiah would be king:
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
His authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness
from this time onward and forevermore.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this. (Isaiah, chapter 9)
When Hezekiah succeeded his father at age 25 and became King of Judah, he quickly set about making changes. Hezekiah centralized more power in Jerusalem by undoing local leadership based on kinship and dismantling localized centers of devotion around Judah. These efforts served to strengthen the king and the priesthood at the Jerusalem temple, the temple built by King Solomon. Even the ancient shrine of Bethel, only 17 miles from Jerusalem and dear to the northern Israelites, was terminated as a place of worship.
As the influence of the king and temple priests increased, it was explained as a spiritual renewal of devotion to YHWH. Perhaps it was. Yet, we can wonder why local expressions of reverence and kinship-based leadership needed the monarchy’s “correction” through centralizing greater control in the temple priesthood and rituals in Jerusalem. That there was political advantage for Hezekiah is not to be doubted. But that it indicated a deepening of the spiritual life of the people requires believing that temple-centered worship and a strengthening of the monarchy is more spiritually renewing than what happened in the local expressions. And did Hezekiah’s ability to withstand Assyria result from these actions alone, or was he helped by Assyrian distractions?
However Hezekiah’s reign is assessed, consider what happens when we hear these words of Isaiah in support of monarchy but think that Isaiah was speaking of Jesus, born seven centuries later? Nonetheless, across Christianity, Isaiah’s words are tightly linked to the annual celebration of the birth of Jesus—so tightly that we can forget to ask, “What was going on in Isaiah’s world that stirred him to utter these hopeful words?” Like all of us, Isaiah had a point of view or worldview; he favored a stronger monarchy. Consequently, he was moved to speak glowing words in favor of the reign of Hezekiah and believed strongly that YHWH’s zeal was expressed in those words.
Though Isaiah spoke eloquently to his situation, many of the words do not describe Jesus at all well. Jesus did not connect himself with the historic throne of David, and rejected notions that his influence should be expressed through the structures of monarchy. Unlike Isaiah who looked at the world through lenses that saw empires as the determiners of life, Jesus looked at the world through lenses that saw creation as primary. Jesus was not an advocate of centralizing worship in the Jerusalem temple and priesthood, nor political power in the reign of Rome. For Isaiah, the Hezekiah kingship was an act of resistance to Assyria’s empire. But Jesus rejected the notion of resisting empires by renewing monarchies, or, in his case, re-establishing David’s monarchy. He was taking David’s lineage in a direction of greater, spiritual consciousness than monarchy can possibly achieve.
So, just how do we understand Isaiah’s prophecy in relationship to Jesus?
Isaiah was an esteemed prophet. His intuitive and imaginative skills gave him perceptions of what was happening in his own society, among the powers beyond his country’s boundaries, and in the spirit or psychology of people. Consequently, he spoke powerful laments and woes, but also encouragements and comforts. These abilities gave his voice authority among the people, and sometimes among the monarchs. But they did not explicitly predict the birth of Jesus.
The Gospel writers, unlike Isaiah’s anticipation of Hezekiah’s kingship, were looking back on the event of Jesus’ birth, not forward to it. They were looking for connections between the events and impacts of Jesus with their sacred texts.
The Gospel writers had come to see the birth of Jesus primarily as an event of new creation, not merely a renewed monarchy. They connected their Gospels more to creation’s unfolding story than to Jewish history though sought continuity with both.
Isaiah functioned within the worldview of empires that evolved as part of the Neolithic Revolution’s way of thinking, what I call the MultiEarth worldview in our time. Isaiah tried hard to make a monarchy work justly. Throughout the Bible, others like Isaiah, tried in every way to make monarchy and Neolithic advance work for people and bioregions. But, the alternative story of the Bible advocates an Earth-size worldview, not empire-size worldview, as the better alternative—what today I call the OneEarth worldview or Creation-size living.
Jesus rejected Isaiah’s worldview, despite the heroic efforts to make the advances of the Neolithic Revolution work as part of a just world that YHWH could favor. That rejection makes it especially important to recognize that despite the eloquence of Isaiah in support of Hezekiah, his prophecy does not describe well the birth or way of Jesus.
To hear Isaiah’s words primarily as prediction of Jesus distorts one of the Bible’s primary benefits: showing how people connected to the land and creation struggle against the worldview of empire and monarchy. Lifting the words of Isaiah 9 out of their important place in this struggle of worldviews—which is exactly what Christians do when they hear these words primarily as predictive prophecy about Jesus—is not only a hurtful misappropriation of what belongs to Jewish history and culture but also a weakening of the Bible as a source for greater understanding in how we can best resist the worldview of empires and monarchs today.
Applying these words to Jesus does not make Isaiah a greater prophet, but misunderstands him. It does not give the Bible greater authority but lessens its relevance to the epic struggle of worldviews polarizing the U.S and the world today. Isaiah’s words show, for example, why resisting the U.S. president by investing all our energy in the other political party is a limited resistance. Jubilee seeks a change in worldview, not a change in political parties. Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. as well as other parties elsewhere have somewhat different positions within the same worldview of empire and control. They do not advocate replacing the imperial, MultiEarth worldview with a jubilary OneEarth way.
Interestingly, the latter half of the book of Isaiah shifts to the jubilary worldview. It speaks of making a Way through the wilderness and bringing a justice deeper than what empires are capable of bringing, a justice expressing obedience to Creation, not the Neolithic conquest of it. This switch to a Jubilee worldview happens beginning with Isaiah, chapter 40. The 66 chapters of this book are actually three compositions from three periods and with three authors. Chapter 9, explained above, comes from Isaiah I (chapters 1-39, 8th century BCE). Isaiah II (chapters 40-55, 6th century BCE) and Isaiah III (chapters 56-66, 5th century BCE) present the alternative worldview of Jubilee and anchored in Creation.
The power of Isaiah’s prophetic imagination to impact how to resist superpower control of creation and people today comes to us best not in how he predicts Jesus as a coming monarch but in how the book shows the necessity to choose the worldview of Jubilee and creation.
[Also included as an extended think-oiece in "Whose Birthday Is It, Anyway?" from Simple Living Works! at
http://simpleliving.startlogic.com/indexoth.php?place=archives/XB/XB2016index.php ]
