11:1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes see,
or decide by what his ears hear;
but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,
and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;
he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,
and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist,
and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
10 On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.
My in-laws, who live in rural Oklahoma have neighbors who used to own this big german shepherd. I mean a BIG german shepherd, like the kind of dog that you really don’t want to have angry with you. One day these neighbors came home to an odd sight. Their dog was curled up around something and they were like what in the world is that, Oh no did he steal some food from the neighbors or something, but then they got closer and saw that whatever it was was moving. And it turns out it was a baby deer. I am an absolute sucker for stories like this of unlikely animal friendships. To see something so massive and intimidating being that gentle with a creature so frail and innocent seems like something out of another world. We so often expect brutality from animals and humans alike, that to see something like this is surprising. It’s like a hint that there are other forces at work in the world than violence, that our desire for belonging and friendship and harmony, to love and be loved, is connected to something real.
Isaiah gives us a vision of a future like this: where the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid, the calf and the lion all live together in harmony; where those who were predators eat salad instead of flesh, where they do not have to exploit another being’s life to make their own; where a child can play near a venomous snake without fear; where no one will hurt or destroy another. At Advent, we wait for this reality by looking forward to the Prince of Peace, the child who will bring about such a world, a world marked not by brutality, but harmony; not violence, but peace (and not just the appearance of peace, but peace that goes all the way down); a world that is shaped not by aggression and fear and exploitation, but by the love of God.
Of course, to say that we wait for such a world is also to confess that our world is not like this. And that is another part of what Advent is for, confession and repentance. In our world, “The wolf might lay down with the lamb but the lamb won’t get much sleep.” We are accustomed to wolves eating lambs, and predators devouring their prey, even as most predators are themselves the prey to someone else a little higher up the food chain. To be a creature in our world is to be eaten. 10% of all the known species on the planet are parasitic insects that live off the life of other living things; and that’s to say nothing of all the world’s fungi and bacteria and yeasts that do the same. To live in this kind of world is to be eaten, to have our flesh taken from us and consumed. “Is this what it’s like,” asks writer Annie Dillard, “a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be nibbled?” She goes on, “[Here’s] a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world, the actual plot of the present moment in time after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling—not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.”
We’re all a little nibbled on, scarred by others’ hunger or greed or just plain aloofness. And sometimes the biggest bites are taken by those who held us closest, by those we thought were supposed to take care of us, and they do so before we even knew to protect ourselves. How many of us have had parts of ourselves devoured forever around a dinner table, in a classroom, a bedroom? In these places of trust and intimacy we found that the wolf wore sheep’s clothing, so we didn’t even see it coming. We get loving and devouring all mixed up, and it makes loving all the harder. We are wounded and from our wounds hurt others, too, even as we try to love them. In Shakespeare’s play called Coriolanus, one character asks another, “Who does the wolf love?” “The lamb.” “Yes, to devour it.”
And then there are the wolves who devour our time and creation around us, the bosses and the billionaires and the powerful institutions that run our world. The take our time and our attention and our health, and they tell us that’s how they love us, they’re doing it all for our own good—sure they make billions in profits and bend the laws to do what they want, but we need them for jobs and development—devouring us is loving us.
The wolf devours and that is how it has learned to love. Wolves takes your flesh from you, and lambs are left to make our way in a world where our bodies are not our own, our days are not our own, even as wolves try to tell them it is for their own good. And so lambs have to learn to pattern our movements around the very possibility of a wolf’s affections. Have you ever noticed how anxious hunted creatures like rabbits and deer can be (well, not the deer here)? Their bodies are conditioned to flee at the slightest signal of a predator. And in the same way we learn to become certain kinds of people who are able to answer to the people who have power over us in our world. Our eyes twitch back to make sure one last time that we didn’t miss an email from that superior, and as one writer puts it, “imaginary administrators whisper in our ears” of all the ways we are in need of correction. We learn to say the answer the teacher wants to hear; we figure what kind of subjects to avoid so that we don’t make that relative angry; we work a couple extra hours so that the boss will know we’re good workers. Like Adam and Eve, we sew leaves over our personalities so that we can make our way in a world full of wolves. Who does the wolf love? That’s who we must become, if we’re to make it. We are stretched between ourselves and the people we are supposed to be, our souls drawn taught between the two.
In the Christmas story, a wolf named Caesar herds his lambs all over his empire. And they comply because complying is how they survive; they’ve learned how to live with wolves in their land for generations now. Caesar is just the most recent. Their bodies are moved so that Caesar can count them. Caesar plans to take thousands and thousands of people and turn them into data. He might not literally eat them but in a way registering them takes their flesh from them all the same as they are transformed from themselves into objects that can be transported and managed and watched. To be registered is to be devoured, consumed, or at the very least it is to become answerable to those who would consume you so that they can do so when they are ready. To register a certain group of people is one of the ways that wolves and lions and leopards get lambs ready for eating.
This is the world to which Jesus comes; a world of hostility organized by wolves and lions and leopards, who send people away from their homes and then force us onto registries so that the predators can eat the fruits of the prey’s labor. Yet while Joseph and Mary might be registered, at the bottom of Caesar’s world, they find a way to live and thrive and nurture the baby in Mary’s belly. Jesus comes into this world run by lions as a lamb, a lamb amongst lambs. As Caesar registers the lambs, Mary and Joseph are left without a place to stay. Where so many of their fellow lambs have found a place for themselves, have found a way to fit in in their displacement, Mary and Joseph “fall through the cracks” and have to stay with the animals.
And there among lambs the Lion of Judah is laid down in swaddling clothes. The first place where the lion and the lamb lie down together is in the person of Jesus, where he does not cling to the form of a lion. He doesn’t come in power to use his power on behalf of the powerless. He comes in weakness to make weakness the way to God’s Kingdom. He doesn’t come as a lion like other lions but is the lion who comes as a lamb to save the world as a lamb. He does not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped, but instead takes on flesh and all the weakness that entails. Predators take flesh away; they use the weakness of flesh as a way to control people and communities. Jesus gives himself as a meal to nourish everyone who humbles themselves to meet at this table.
Who does the wolf love? Himself, if anyone. But in Jesus, the Love of God enfleshes, comes to be present, present in weakness, in sickness, in frailty; it does not shy away from any of the pains we would rather hide, and yet it also waits for us to let down our defenses before touching our wounds. “16 We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. 17 How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister[f] in need and yet refuses help?” Love is the commons of the manger, and this kind of love reflects God’s own love. The God we worship is the commons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who don’t hold onto power or control, but give divinity back and forth to each other—that overflowing giving is what God is. And in Jesus, God gives us that love too, so that we can know love by holding all things in common. Where wolves take and exploit and in so doing wound us, the love of God calls us to share everything with each other, to live as a community where we share everything together. That’s what it means for the wolf to live with the lamb. That only works if wolves stop eating lambs, and if lambs organize to stick together and care for one another where wolves have wounded us, so we know we don’t need their teeth in our world.
Love does not keep register of wrongs. Caesar the wolf ignores the flesh, treats it as something to be disciplined. Caesar forgets the person for a data point that can be recorded in a chart. It is easy to devour someone who has been reduced to a label. But flesh cannot be smoothed out so easily; it’s dappled, dimpled, mottled, varied. Flesh is beautiful and warm and pockmarked and scarred. It’s vulnerable, yes, but that’s because it’s complex and won’t fit into Caesar’s easy classifications.
The voice of the wolf looks to cut us off from the love of God, and the love of God displayed in our neighbor, by trapping us in our own heads. The wolf whispers shame into your ear and makes lists to keep us in place. But neither is stronger than the lion of Judah, who is the lamb slain from the foundations of the world. Because in Jesus the lion and the lamb are one, it is possible, even if its difficult, in a world of brutality and aggression and fear, to choose meekness and hospitality and love as a better way, by looking one another full in the face and feeding one another the bread and the cup, by holding all things in common. Amen.
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