Isaiah 11:1-10

Jesse was the father of David. The OT reading gives us a very early use of the metaphor of a family tree. This will be very important by the 1st century. Jesse's name appears in the geneaology of Christ at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew. Much was made of lineage and heritage in those times. The "tree" idea has now become so common, we don't think of it strictly in terms of "begats". We see it in biology, in the evolutionary tree of all life. We know traits like hair color get passed on, but traits like "kingliness" do not.

We also know that lions don't eat straw and you shouldn't play with cobras. Even though people hearing this wouldn't have had the biology education you do, they still would have known that this is metaphor. They would have known that "and a little child shall lead them" meant there would be so much peace in the world that it would not require adult skills to handle the livestock. It was only a thousand years later that someone came up with ideas about children being leaders or this being a prophecy. Those weren't scholars doing textual criticism to figure that out, it was people turning off their brains and wanting to see the baby Jesus in every verse.

You could read verse 3 and think Isaiah is telling you to not trust yourself. But note he only mentions eyes and ears. I think this makes perfect sense. You can't always trust your own senses. They fool you. Sometimes they tell you to be afraid when you don't need to be, but that might save your life, so it's not such a bad thing. So I don't see this as another anti-intellectual passage. If anything this can be seen as a harmonization.

I hope you'll forgive me while I take detour into the fundamentalist world. You can skip this if it doesn't apply to you.

On the website Answers in Genesis, they say, "Two problems prevent anyone from legitimately calling evolution a theory. First, there’s no direct, observable experiment that can ever be performed. Scientists can measure bones, study mutations, decode DNA, and notice similarities in morphology (the form and structure of animals and plants), but they can never test evolutionary events in the past." They also say Evolution is a necessary requirement of naturalism.

This is how they make it impossible to know things, and make it seem logical that you should just trust them, instead of science. True, evolution happens so slowly, it is almost impossible to observe. So they say you can't test it, then they say you have to see it for naturalism to be true. That's just plain false. Naturualism is a philosophy anyway, a premise, so it isn't even a claim of truth. And evolution is observed, both in our understanding of genetics and in the fossil record. Rather than me trying to regurgitate science that I learned from scientists, I recommend going here for further questions.

What's sad is, there is no reason for believers to be threatened by Darwin and his theories anyway. Understanding where we came from can only hasten us toward a better life for our progeny. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and a famous anti-theist, says Darwin doesn't detract from the mystery of why we are here, "Study your Darwinism for two reasons,” he implored, “because it explains why you’re here, and the second reason is, study your Darwinism in order to learn what to avoid in setting up society. What we need is a truly anti-Darwinian society. Anti-Darwinian in the sense that we don’t wish to live in a society where the weakest go to the wall, where the strongest suppress the weak, and even kill the weak. We — I, at least — do not wish to live in that kind of society. I want to live in the sort of society where we take care of the sick, where we take care of the weak, take care of the oppressed, which is a very anti-Darwinian society.” - Click for more.

Besides, there is no great leap from the Bible to Darwin. Saint Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and many before him were already working out how nature worked its miracles and how we can understand it without losing our traditions. Darwin agonized over the effect his theory would have on the culture. He grew up reading the Bible and knew full well he was providing an explanation that would be called an alternative. But he was not the first to have such thoughts. He built on the work of people like William Paley and others who harmonized observed behaviors with what he thought were God’s intentions.

As Paley said in Moral and Political Philosophy in 1835,

“God wills the happiness of man. Now, civil society conduces to that end. But civil society requires that each member be bound to support the interest of the whole. Hence, if the interest of the whole be supported by obeying the established form of government, it is the will of God that each person obey such established form, so long as the interest of the whole requires it; that is, so long as submission brings to the whole fewer evils than resistance would.”

Matthew 3:1-12

I try to salvage these pericopes whenever I can. Some impose quite a challenge. The ax and the tree could be taken metaphorically, but chaff in the unquenchable fire seems pretty clear. Some people say the messianic message was corrupted by the Hellenized Greeks. I've never quite figured out what they are talking about. The fires of hell were a Greek concept. The OT had death as an end, no reward, no punishment. It could be some of that Greek mythology entering in here. That doesn't make this statement any better.

There are some other classics here, crying in the wilderness, brood of vipers, the kingdom has come near.

"Brood of vipers" may sound tame to us today, but it was among the worst of insults. Pharisees and Saducees are villians throughout the gospels. The few of them that are named are not confirmed as real people as far as I know. In fact I'm pretty sure they just represent the ideas of powerful people sidling up to the latest money interests and of the power hungry, legalistic leaders. They probably weren't wondering around in the wilderness, checking up on some guy performing baptisms.

So, the best I can do here is hope John the Baptist is not suggesting we literally hit anyone with an ax and throw them in a fire. He is saying that those who think they are fine simply because they can claim to be an ancestor of Abraham had better watch out. Change is coming, represented by fire. Justice and goodness doesn't come from ancestry, it is a part of the natural order, as represented by stones. The rules and twisted theology that is being taught won't matter. Those natural forces work to create people who will speak the truth.

In verse 9, Abraham represents goodness, but in that compact verse, you are also warned that simply being an ancestor of good people is not enough. There is a moral arc "that bends toward justice" as Martin Luther King Jr. said. Violent images are invoked here, and even non-violent resistance invokes images of violent oppression. But I don't see a specific call to violence in these words, or the rest of the book. I see this as a reclaiming of the tradition by the people out in the wilderness, the ones out on the fringes, the marginalized. They know they have the moral high ground. They believe there is a power that is coming to set things right.