Do you ever take time to watch young children play with their stuffed animals? Dogs, lambs, bears, snakes, dinosaurs of all different shapes and sizes gather together and perform their roles according to the dictates of the child’s imagination. We don’t bother telling them that bears eat lions or that snakes are dangerous. We just sit back and enjoy them creating their make believe world.
Today as we take our first steps along the Advent path, we listen to Isaiah. His words make us think he’s been spending too much time watching little children play (Isaiah 11::1-10).
“On that day…the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopards shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the young lion shall browse together with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors…The baby shall play by the cobra’s nest…”
What! The lamb invites the wolf to her tea party, leopards and goats take naps together, calves and young lions eat at the same table, and little babies play in the dirt outside the cobra’s hole! And to top it off “a little child” is in charge of this strange, make-believe world.
Do you think Isaiah let his imagination get the better part of him?
And yet he says all this will take place “on that day.” What day is he talking about? It all begins with one unusual man.
“A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.”
Someone unimpressive—a simple bud coming from a wild shoot that springs from a dead tree stump. Yet what makes this “bud” powerful is that the Spirit of the Lord rests upon him.
“A Spirit of wisdom and understanding. A Spirit of counsel and of strength. A Spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord.”
This bud is equipped with the very powers of God—unusual wisdom, strength, and knowledge. God himself will rule through this “bud” and bring about the kind of peace that allows snakes to like children and lambs to like wolves.
And where will all this take place?
“There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as water covers the sea.”
This unusual world will be established by the “bud” on God’s holy mountain. And, then, from this mountain will spring a fountain of God’s loving presence that goes out to the world covering it as “water covers the sea.”
We sophisticated believers know who this “bud” is and where the “holy mountain” is. We also know that the “on that day” has already occurred when Jesus Christ walked the earth. Wherever he walked, this humble rabbi brought peace—sick people were miraculously healed, demons were driven out of people, storms were quieted, and shortages of food were replaced with an abundance of bread. Oh how we wished we live “on that day.”
Basic Christian theology reminds us that “that day” is today. Jesus still walks this earth in his Church—his living Body on earth. Isaiah’s fantasy world is now—at least potentially. Those filled with the Holy Spirit become a fountain of God’s power and presence that goes out to the world and covers it as waters cover the sea. “That day” is not something of the past nor of the future; it is “now!”
The history of the Church has much evidence of how “that day” has extended through history. Today is the feast of Francis Xavier, a man so on fire with God, that he moved into a land whose language he didn’t know and brought hundreds of thousands of people to Christ. He brought the vision of Isaiah to life in the East Indies and Japan.
We all come up short in our holiness and missionary potential. Advent is a new opportunity for us to become alive anew in the Holy Spirit…and to be living “buds” of the presence of Jesus in the mission territories where we live.
“May he rule from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth” (Ps 72:8).
