Isaiah 24, Colossians 1.15-20
This passage from the Book of Isaiah was assembled a long after his own time. We know this because it’s a pastiche of other poetic prophecies, from Amos, Jeremiah, Hosea, and probably other unknown prophets whose poems didn’t make it into the Old Testament apart from here. But whereas the original prophecies all applied to specific times and places they have been reimagined here as a general warning about the perils of breaking God’s covenant. The message is that God won’t be too chuffed. He will twist the earth out of shape, like someone screwing up rubbish and throwing it away.
Long ago, says the compiler of this passage, God called us to look after the earth and be co-creators or collaborators with him. It’s not clear when the Prophet thinks God is supposed to have made this covenant with us. Was it at the very beginning of the human story, when God told human beings to take dominion over the earth in his name? Or was it in the time of Noah, when the rainbow became a sign of hope that God would trust us to live more faithfully in future?
Either way, it was a forlorn hope. The covenant has been broken and the earth lies under a curse because of our disobedience. Harvests are failing and fighting, earthquakes, hurricanes or floods are devastating towns and cities. Even the people in the towns which have been left unscathed are hiding indoors, presumably for fear of lawlessness. Whole nations are being blighted by economic failure. Happy times have disappeared and no one has much to celebrate.
It’s a gloomy picture, [and it could easily throw a bit of a damper on our traditional harvest festival celebrations], but the Prophet acknowledges that some people all over the world still continue to praise God and call for justice. So we’re not alone in celebrating the essential goodness of creation and the need to nurture and protect it. The trouble is, says the Prophet, either there are too few of us or we’re not totally sincere, so he doubts that anything will improve. Can environmentalists and people who claim, like us, to care about the planet, be trusted to follow through on our prayers and promises? ‘So many people are treacherous,’ the Prophet complains. All our prayers, and praises, all good intentions, could so easily be forgotten and then we might return to squandering the Earth’s resources, spoiling its fragile equilibrium and allowing the consequences to fall on the poorest and the weakest.
One of the interesting things about Space travel is that we can now see clearly just how much impact human activity has been having on the earth, even in the short time since we first ventured into Space sixty years ago. The prophet’s forecast would seem to have come true. ‘The foundations of the earth have indeed been shaken.’ But is it also true, as he says, ‘That the earth will fall never to get up again’?
Some scientists do already believe that global warming is too far advanced to stop, and many more think that if President Trump succeeds in turning the clock back - and abandoning America’s modest commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions - a tipping point will have been passed. It’s not surprising, therefore, that the Prophet expects the kings of the earth to be punished for their inaction. But in the end, he finds that he cannot lose all hope. God’s will must eventually prevail. ‘The Lord All-Powerful will rule in wonderful glory,’ he says.
We could easily despair at the message of this poem, which so accurately reflects the dismal state of our world today even though it was compiled two thousand five hundred years ago. However, I think the prophet is challenging us to take seriously the degradation of our environment and make it our number one concern. He uses the shocking images of the poem to show that the damage human beings are doing the Earth is not just another issue to be considered alongside everything else; it’s the issue from which everything else flows.
If we honour the promises and praises of our worship in our daily lives, and in the everyday decisions we make, can we help other people to glimpse the glory of God and of his creation which - at the end - the poem celebrates? Perhaps then, if many like-minded people start to make the same incremental changes in their lives, and countries and governments start to put the environment at the top of their agenda, God can be glorified without the big showdown that otherwise the Prophet thinks is inevitable.
In an amazing hymn in the first letter to the church at Colossae Paul weaves together all of the threads we have drawn out of the passage from Isaiah. Not only is God glorified through his unspoilt creation but so is Jesus, who is the image of God in humankind. Jesus is in creation itself, through his intimate link to God’s creativity, and through him we can become participants in the creative process too.
The Prophet feared that everything is falling apart, never to be reassembled and put back in working order, a bit like a complicated Lego toy that takes all Christmas Day and Boxing Day to put together and then is dropped on the floor during a game, breaks into pieces and some of the tiniest Lego bricks disappear under the sofa, or precious vase knocked off a shelf by a careless tourist in a museum; can experts painstakingly glue it back together so that no one can really tell the difference, or will it forever be a broken vase? Paul promises that in Jesus ‘all things hold together.’
Paul says this isn’t wishful thinking, and it isn’t something that happens by magic or without effort. God is reconciling all things to himself by making peace with a disobedient world through Jesus’ death on the cross.
In this short passage his death goes from being something of personal significance, reconciling sinful individuals like you and I to God, to being something of cosmic significance. We could almost say that it is world shattering in its impact, but we really mean the opposite; Jesus’ death runs the film backwards and reassembles or reconciles the broken pieces.
Beyond being a striking and enduring image, what does this mean in practice? First, that putting the world to rights, reconciling what is broken, is costly. Jesus has shown the way, but we have to follow and share the cost. It will not happen just because we fervently wish it could be so. And second, it means that it is still attainable. As the Prophet finally recognised at the end of his poem, all is not lost because the glory of God will endure. Paul says that God in Jesus is still endeavouring to make peace with the world, and he calls us to be peacemakers with him.
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