🦁 Advent 1-5
Reflection
Good morning and welcome to the fifth day of Advent. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from Albany, Oregon. Our readings come to us this morning from Psalm 79, Micah four in Revelation 15, and the Micah reading stood out to me not only because of the the beating of weapons of war into gardening tools, which is also also appears in Isaiah.
Goodness, I cannot remember. Isaiah 6 or 4? I can't remember. Or 3? Where Micah borrows from Isaiah to create this imagery of breaking down the systems that make war inevitable. And building out of them something that God intended to be inevitable, which is creation and recreation in gardening.
But something else stood out to me this morning as well as I read, and that was after reading Judges 9 the, I believe the earliest and longest parable of the Old Testament. The, it's called the, the parable of Jotham or the parable of the Bramble King and you can look at the Bramble King on the training room, the blog of PPHQ and talk about how it's, I think it's an A wildly underestimated and underappreciated section of the Bible.
It talks about the birth of the monarchy in the Israelite imagination. Where Jotham is the only surviving child of Gideon, after one of his half brothers killed 70 of his, of their children. half brothers. And Jotham stands up because Abimelech, which means father of all kings, is trying to make himself king over all Israel, over all the tribes.
And Jotham stands up and has his parable and he talks about the trees, sometimes called the parable of the trees, and the trees want a ruler, just as Israel wants a ruler in 1 Samuel 8 and Deuteronomy 17? I can't remember. And Samuel is told by God, look, Don't worry about it. They're not rejecting you.
They're rejecting me the adoption of kings of monarchic political polity Is a step away from God. It's a bad thing And so Jotham tells us parable of the trees as Israel who want a king who wants someone to reign over them And in nature, if you're over someone else, you're getting the sunlight and that shrub or the grass is getting less sunlight, which, you know, you, we could equate with God and the warmth of God and all these, you know, the, there are these four different trees listed.
There's the grape vines, a fig tree, um, the cedars of Lebanon. I feel like there's one more and I can't remember. And then finally the bramble, which is essentially a berry. You could eat it. It depends on which translation, who you believe, what this Hebrew word was intending to imply. But it's essentially a thornbush.
And who the hell wants to sit under a thornbush, which is already low lying but they, the thornbush is the only one who's willing to be the king. And he essentially says, look, I know he doesn't say it outright, but if you think about it, you're not going to like life under a thornbrush. You're going to want to leave.
So the thornbush says, look, if you if you run away, I'll burn you down like the cedar, like the, you know, a devouring fire will come out from me. And this word devour Homes, I believe, is related to Hamas, which means armed, and Milchama, which means war. And so, Kings come with war, and kings are a step away from God.
And so in verse 4 of the Micah passage, immediately after the most known one, Micah 4, 3 beat their swords and plowshares, won't lift up nation, nation won't lift up weapons against each other, they won't learn from they won't even learn war anymore. But it goes further. And I think Micah's alluding to the parable of the Bramble King.
They shall all sit under their own vines, one of the plants mentioned, and their own fig trees, another one of their own. of the plants from the Bramble King parable. And no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken. And the mouth is what sends out the devouring fire from the thornbrush, thornbush.
So I think we are missing out on the richness of this passage when we don't recognize the significance of the parable of the Bramble King in Judges 9. And that section of Judges Especially 4 and 5 concerning Deborah and Gideon and a song of Deborah and Jael who killed Sisera. Scholars believe this is some of the oldest surviving written traditions, uh, that you can find in Hebrew scriptures.
The language is really archaic and it seems really unique. It seems like something that the Israelites had passed on the longest that survived until it was compiled into Greek as a Septuagint in the 3rd century. So it's really important to, that monarchy or that kind of pyramid structure of, of rulership is related to violence.
And this brings me to the passage in Revelation. I always say, anytime we're reading from, One of the Johannine letters, they seem to like this phrase, the Lamb of God, and in the Gospel of John, it, the line is, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, there is no such animal. The, the, the, not Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, maybe it is Yom Kippur, the Yom, Kapoor goat.
There are two goats. One is sacrificed on the altar. The other one is then splattered with that goat's blood and sent off into the wilderness, and it takes away the sins or iniquities of the people. It is very, very clearly a goat. Now I always, I criticize that because we associate sheep with gentility and niceness and smoothing things over and cutesy and dependent and blah, blah, blah.
But I think one of the reasons that John does this, perhaps, is that the, the imagery of warring in heaven that he uses is so overt and dire that to use a goat, it, it just feels improper because that's not the kind, that's not the way in which Christ does battle. He did go to the cross. He did so obediently.
He did so rather meekly. But he did so dressed for battle. He did that. That is a battle that is going on in heaven, on the earth, that we may not see and we may not appreciate. And in that moment, God, or Jesus, doesn't really reflect the trappings of a goat. He is more meek. And so it's this balance of these really uh, heavy populist kind of symbols, like the goat like the crow who goes off and, and before the dove to seek land when Noah, at the end of the flood, is looking for land.
John, I think, is trying to balance this. I'm not speaking for the gospel of John, but at least in Revelation, Jesus is a lamb because it reflects the kind of attitude that he goes to the cross with. Reflects in Genesis where all God has to do is speak and things are made. It doesn't take effort by God.
It doesn't take passion. It doesn't take you know, kind of goat difficulty or misbehaving or anything. This is the nature of the war that God wages against, um, his enemies.
Reflection
