Our true nature

Isaiah 65:17-25

17 For I am about to create new heavens    and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating,  for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight.

19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it or the cry of distress.

20 No more shall there be in it an infant who lives but a few days or an old person who does not live out a lifetime, for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.

21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;    they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.

22 They shall not build and another inhabit;    they shall not plant and another eat,for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

23 They shall not labor in vain or bear children for calamity, for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord— and their descendants as well.

24 Before they call I will answer,    while they are yet speaking I will hear.

25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;    the lion shall eat straw like the ox,    but the serpent—its food shall be dust!They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

As you may know, our church has, from the beginning, followed the Revised Common Lectionary, which every week prescribes Scriptures readings - OT, psalm, NT, and Gospel - on a three year cycle.  Among the benefits of adopting this practice is that it unites us to other churches around the world and invites us to read widely in Scripture - including the parts we might otherwise ignore.  More or less the entirety of the four Gospels gets read, as does much of the NT and psalms.  But the OT is just too vast to read much of it, even over the course of 3 years. A lot gets omitted, including - oddly -  much of the earliest chapters of Genesis, literally the foundational passages for the rest of the story.  

The Bible opens with God speaking creation into existence, and Christian theology has long insisted that God creates ex nihilo - out of nothing - for if there is something pre-existing then God is not really the creator, just someone playing with the materials provided by another prior being.  The answer to the core philosophical question - why does anything exist rather than nothing? - is that the eternal God created it.   And if God is indeed omniscient and all-powerful, then God is necessarily responsible for creation.  Like the builder in Jesus’ parable who must count the cost before beginning construction of the tower, so must God “count the cost” in creation.   God creates fully aware of all the good and the bad that will result.  

This is essential because, though God declared creation “good”, Genesis also includes the story of how that goodness got corrupted - and that corruptibility enters creation via the capacity of the creature God has made to rebel.  This necessarily is something that God foresaw and nevertheless permitted.  It’s part of the cost of creation, a cost which God nevertheless deems worth paying, as it were.   How even to characterize what happened when Adam and Eve at the fruit is itself very difficult, but Genesis is quite clear that this fateful act results in various curses: women will bear children through painful labor; men will till the earth, eking out sustenance through their toil.  

The passage about Adam and Eve and the fruit on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is inexhaustibly rich, but for now the point is simply to observe that what we take to be human nature - childbirth hurts, we have to work hard to survive - was not originally part of creation.  Before Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden, all their needs provided, unaware that they were naked.   Much of what we take to be immutable facts of life are actually not the way things were, nor the way they will be.  

For Christians to speak about “nature” or what is “natural” is actually quite challenging, whether we realize it or not, for we might mean nature has God intended it or we might mean nature as we know it - but these are not the same thing.   To take one example, consider gender roles.  One of the curses pronounced upon Eve - and all women - was that “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”  You might take this as evidence that the patriarchy is a natural part of human life, but then you also might take it as evidence that the subjugation of women is, as it says, a curse, that it was not part of God’s original intent for creation nor God’s future intentions, and is thus unnatural, a state of affairs not to receive gladly but one to overcome.  Are we to live in the light of the way things are or the way they should be?  

As an aside, One way of understanding the fundamental difference between the politics of left and right is with respect to how each answers this question

If you’re wondering why I’m talking about this, it’s because the passage from Isaiah (and many others like it) presents a vision of natural life transformed.  In that day children will not die, and even one hundred years will be a short life.  This doesn’t quite evoke eternal life, but it’s pointing that direction.  If there is a single fact of life, it is that we all die.  As the curse from Genesis also states - and as we proclaim over ourselves on Ash Wednesday - from dust we have come and to dust we shall return.  Who could deny that death is a natural part of life?  And indeed we must live in the awareness that death comes for us all, that because time is short we must live our days with purpose.  But even here the Christian story treats death as an uninvited guest, a fact of life as we know it but something that was not present in the Garden and will not be present when the kingdom comes on Earth as is heaven.  We were not made to die, and even though we die, yet shall we live.  Death is unnatural.  

The vision in Isaiah follows this logic to an extreme but evocative and, dare I say, moving image:

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;    the lion shall eat straw like the ox,    but the serpent—its food shall be dust!They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the Lord.

It is the nature of a wolf, we would certainly agree, to eat the sheep, if given the chance, and yet here we are to imagine these two enemies living as friends, eating together.  We are to imagine the lion, rather than craving and killing, eating straw like the ox.  We are to imagine a time when their natures will be transformed, when there will be no predator and prey, when there will be no pain or suffering, when all will be at peace.  Or rather than a transformation, we might better think of it as a restoration of their true natures, that what fell apart God put back together, that what got twisted and distorted, God has made right again.  

Now, you might be running all kinds of questions through your mind like, if lions aren’t meant to kill and eat, then why have they got those big sharp teeth?  And what were the mosquito and the tic doing before Adam and Eve ate the fruit?  And if you’re interested in evolutionary theory you can entertain yourself thinking about how all this does and doesn’t fit together.  All that is fairly interesting, but somewhat beside the point.  I suspect there won’t literally come a day when the wolf and the lamb will sit down together in peace or when the lion eats straw, but I sure do hope there comes a day when the essence of this passage is fulfilled.  Visions are never meant to be dogmatic; rather they give shape to our hopes and inspire faithfulness toward them.  

I’m not exactly an unbiased, impartial observer, but it seems to me that one of the most compelling aspects of Christianity is that it simultaneously holds together both the beauty and the brokenness of the human experience, it gives expression to the universal human aspiration toward something higher and purer, to the yearning that tells us there must be more to life than this.  That is nothing less than the longing for God.  

Visions like this one in Isaiah give expression to that fundamental desire even as they also teach us what our desires should be.  It’s so easy, fallen creatures in a fallen world that we are, to assume that the way things are is the only what they can or ever will be.  Isaiah invites us to lift up our eyes and behold a vision of the future, and not only to long for it to come true, but even to live as if it were true, to find in our ultimate destiny our purpose and direction here and now.  

We must, of course, open our eyes to the present reality.  We, of all people, must commit ourselves to the truth rather than wishful thinking.  We should protect the sheep from the wolves, not just hope they won’t attack.  We can’t deny nature.  But at the same time, to be Christian, if it’s anything, is to insist that nature as we know it can and will be transcended.   Which is another way of saying that we believe the kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven.   And we are to be the people who orient ourselves to the eternal even in this temporal frame, who reach for the infinite even as we acknowledge our frail finitude.  And this might open us up to the possibility that some, maybe much, of what we take for granted in this life, is, in fact, not set in stone, that we can live according to our true nature right here, right now.