The Root of Jesse
Preacher: Professor Oliver Crisp, Principal of St Mary’s College and Head of School of Divinity
Readings: Matthew 3: 1-12; Isaiah 11:1-10
It is the season of Advent, when Christians traditionally prepare themselves for the celebration of the incarnation at Christmastide. As the winter draws on, and the days grow shorter, we wrap ourselves against the cold and think about warm nights indoors by the fire. There is something magical about this time of year, and perhaps especially in this part of the world. Yet it is strange that this is the case, given that the original nativity was not in a barn in frozen Fife, but in rather warmer climes of the Middle East. Our celebration of Christmas bears little relation to the events of two thousand years ago in a remote and rather inconsequential part of the Roman Empire.
Similarly, at this time of year if we think of the incarnation it is usually picturing the sweet, helpless baby Jesus in the crib or in his mother’s arms. He seems so inoffensive—after all, who could be offended by a bairn? At some level, when we reflect on matters, we do connect the baby in the crib with the rabbi from Nazareth. But when we do, it is usually a rather rose-tinted—or stained glass—version of Jesus. He is gentle Jesus meek and mild, or the kind Jesus who wants the best for us. Saccharine Jesus; a person so otherworldly in his saintliness that we cannot believe he was a real human being who felt and worried as we do, and who had real joys or concerns. Jesus as inoffensive baby, or Jesus as meek and mild-mannered saviour. Or, if we deny that Jesus is a saviour, perhaps Jesus as meek and mild-mannered religious teacher. He may have said some things that sound like fortune-cookie wisdom, but little of what he said has any real-world implications (or so we might think). His words are a crutch for the intellectually and psychologically weak, or those who need their lives to be propped up by the hope of a messiah.
It is strange that these are not images one finds in the Bible. Perhaps this Advent, we might set to one side the prefabricated pictures of Jesus of Nazareth that we might bring to the table and think instead about some of the images we do find in the Bible. We might be surprised by what we find there.
In our readings from the Lectionary this morning we had two such pictures set before us. The first, from the prophet Isaiah, written many hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, is usually thought to be an image of a messianic figure—someone who will one day come to save God’s people, and reveal God’s purposes once and for all. Such images are usually call apocalyptic in biblical studies. Not because they picture the end of the world necessarily, though they often do, but because they unveil something of God’s purposes that are otherwise hidden from us. (The root word from which we get our word apocalypse has this meaning of unveiling what was previously hidden, thereby revealing it.) Now, this first picture for the most part is fairly positive. This figure is styled “The Root of Jesse” and he will be a leader whose actions are just and right, and who will set things in order, righting wrongs and delivering appropriate judgments. “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear” the prophet says. Rather, “with righteousness he will judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth (vs.4-5). We are then treated to a famous passage in which the prophet paints for us a vivid picture of what the rule of this messianic figure will look like. Under his reign the wolf will live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid. Lions will even eat straw like oxen, and toddlers will play beside the nests of snakes. His reign will inaugurate a new age in which “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (vs. 9). “On that day,” says the prophet, “the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.” (vs 10)
Even though this is clearly a kind of vision, the picture language of which is full of symbolic meaning (not all of which is apparent to modern readers), it is clear the message is that this person will bring about something significant and will do this by the power of God. He will inaugurate a kingdom of peace and godliness. Christian thinkers have traditionally understood this passage to be a foretelling of Christ. It is his kingdom that is being spoken of, so they think. The revolution brought about by the ministry, teaching, life, and death of Christ is what is in view here—which all depends on the incarnation. God breaks into human history in the person of Christ, and brings about the beginning of an apocalypse—a revealing of things previously hidden from human gaze. For, these Christians teach, Christ is God made human. His words are literally God’s words, and his actions God’s actions. Therefore, in considering what Christ has to teach us and the legacy he leaves us, we are considering the words and legacy of God incarnate. This is where the phrase “the root of Jesse” is important. The expectation was that God’s saviour or messiah would come from the line of the Old Testament king, David. His father was Jesse. So, in a figurative way, David was of the stock or root of Jesse. From the line of Jesse came those who had a claim to the throne of Israel. They were members of the royal household. Thus, in connecting this messianic figure with the root of Jesse, the prophet is making a statement about the legitimacy of his claim to the throne of Israel: this savour would be the rightful King whose reign would inaugurate a new rule of peace that might even surpass that of his ancestor David. Those who are careful readers of the Bible will know that this connection is taken up by the New Testament writers who specifically connect Jesus with the line of David. So it is that Jesus has come to be seen as the root of Jesse of whom the prophet Isaiah speaks here in Isaiah 11.
Let us turn to the second passage we read from the lectionary readings for today. This was from the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew. Here we see a different prophet, in fact, the last of the Old Testament prophets: John the Baptizer. In point of fact he was the cousin of Jesus. But here we see him in the garb of the wild desert prophet. Just as you might expect a professor or a lawyer to wear a gown on formal occasions as a mark of their office, so here the author of the Gospel describes for us the garb of John. It is the clothing typical of the ascetic, of the holy man living remotely in the desert. He wears rough clothing made of camel hair, bound by a leather belt, and his diet is the diet of the hermit. It is what can be found in the wilderness of Jordan: locusts and wild honey. He is active in the Jordan valley by the river, and people come to hear his fiery preaching and to be baptised for the remission of their sins by him in the waters of the Jordan river.
Notice the connection made by the Gospel writers to Isaiah, right at the beginning of the passage. John is the voice of one calling in the wilderness to make straight the paths for God and prepare the way for him. That is his mission. To prepare the path for the coming messiah. It is an apocalyptic message. But his message is rather different from the one we saw in the mouth of Isaiah. His vision is not for a peaceful kingdom ruled over by the root of Jesse. Rather, his vision is of a huge furnace into which is cast roots of trees that do not bear fruit but are worthless. He addresses the religious leaders that have come out to the desert to hear him as serpents, a brood of vipers! And the coming messiah of whom John speaks is one who clears the threshing floor with his winnowing fork, casting the chaff into the furnace. The whole sense of the message of John is of urgent and cataclysmic change that will result in the division of his hearers into those who are saved and those who are lost. And woe betide those who are lost! It is fiery rhetoric in more ways than one.
How do we reconcile these two pictures if they speak of the same person? And what might this tell us about the incarnation as we prepare ourselves this Advent season?
First, let us suppose, as has traditionally been thought in much Christian teaching, that these two passages do indeed speak of the same person. And let us suppose that this person is Jesus of Nazareth. I grant that these are large assumptions. But one has to begin somewhere! Now, on the face of it Isaiah’s vision of a coming deliverer who is the Root of Jesse, the rightful heir to the throne of King David seems to be in tension with the fiery apocalyptic vision of John the Baptizer. How can this messianic figure both winnow his people on the threshing floor and cast some into a fiery furnace and yet also be one who brings peace and a kingdom in which the earth will be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea?
My suggestion is we dig a little deeper. After all, first impressions can be misleading. That is especially true of prophetic literature, littered as it often is with striking images and metaphors that grab our attention but that can be difficult to decipher. The big picture is this: a divine messenger is coming who will ring the changes. This person is a particularly notable individual, one who has an intimate relationship with God, being God’s direct appointee. His ministry will be apocalyptic—in the sense in which I used that term earlier, that is, as the unveiling or revealing of things previously hidden. It is as if both these prophetic visions pull back the curtain that divides our mundane reality from the spiritual world, showing us from a kind of God’s eye view what is going on behind the scenes. This messenger will inaugurate significant change. It will be both divisive and decisive. Divisive, because (so it seems at least) not all will be won over to his message. This is the vivid picture of the winnowing fork and the furnace that John paints for us. But it will also be decisive because it will begin a new rule that will have far reaching consequences for all humanity. This is the bucolic picture of ferocious animals lying with domesticated creatures, and children playing with serpents that Isaiah gives us. So the message of both these prophets can be reconciled in broad terms if we take them to be picture language about the same events told from different perspectives or different vantages. The first, of Isaiah, emphasizes the royal connection to Israel’s kings and the way in which this messianic reign with have far reaching and constructive consequences for God’s people and humanity more broadly. The other, the picture of John, foregrounds the way in which the message of the messiah upends the settled order of things, dividing up those who are for and those who are against his message. The furnace is an indicator of just how consequential his words will be: they will be difference between life and death.
When we read such passages, they should jolt us. They are meant to discombobulate. The biblical picture of Jesus of Nazareth has elements that include the babe in the manger, and episodes that describe the gentleness and kindness of the rabbi he became. But this is not the whole story. To reduce Jesus to one or other of these images is to rob the Gospel of its power. It is also to do violence to the picture of Christ with which it confronts us. The Christian message is one that is a matter of life and death; of now and the hereafter; of today and eternity. It isn’t that it brings God’s world close to ours. Rather, it reveals that this mudane world in which we live is in fact suffused with the presence and purposes of God. It is just that too often we fail to notice. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the life and ministry of Christ, the God-man. As we prepare ourselves for Christmas this Advent season, we could do worse than begin by acknowledging the complexity of the picture of Christ we find in Scripture.