😇 Advent 2
Readings: Isaiah 11, Psalm 72, Romans 15, Matthew 3.
TRNG References:
Central Thesis/Theme: The Divine Warrior motif reveals God's power as fundamentally creative rather than combative. Where Babylonian cosmology imagines creation emerging from divine conflict, the Hebrew imagination presents a God who speaks reality into existence—conquering not through violence but through divine intent and breath. This contrast between conflict-based and creativity-based cosmologies defines the difference between worldly power systems and the kingdom that emerges through ordinary humanity.
Key Textual/Historical Insights: Isaiah 11 introduces the Armor of God motif with two foundational pieces: the breastplate of righteousness (tsedek/soteria) and the helmet of salvation, which reappear throughout Scripture including Ephesians and 1 Thessalonians. The "root of Jesse" references David as youngest of eight sons, establishing Messianic expectation through the unexpected. The Sadducees (Tzadikim) claimed the name "righteous ones" to legitimate their politically-appointed authority under Herod, breaking the authentic Zadokite priestly line that ran from Solomon's temple through the Maccabees. When Jesus (Joshua ben Miriam) and Caiaphas face each other, everyone knows who was appointed versus who was anointed—both descend from Aaron, but only one represents hereditary legitimacy. John the Baptist's "brood of vipers" uses diminutive language for young snakes, which are more dangerous than mature ones because they cannot control their venom.
Theological Argument: The Hebrew God creates through logos and breath, not through cosmic battle. This represents a direct confrontation with Mesopotamian conflict theory—the assumption that we must fight for what we have because the gods fought before us. Augustine's "privation of evil" emerges from this Hebrew imagination: evil is absence, not competing power. The contrast extends to language itself: Hebrew (Ivri—"one who crosses over from afar") cultivates an imagination of God as utterly other, requiring no struggle to establish authority. When God strikes the earth "with the word of his mouth" and "the breath of his lips," we see Genesis creation language weaponized—not through violence but through the same creative power that spoke light into existence.
Contemporary Application: Political and religious power structures consistently exploit language to maintain control. The Sadducees claimed "righteousness" through naming while serving Herod's appointments. Similarly, modern institutions weaponize biblical interpretation, claiming authority through titles and positions rather than through authentic lineage or calling. The contrast between appointed and anointed authority remains urgent: Do leaders deserve our trust based on what they claim, or based on what they do? The unpredictability of "baby snakes"—those who cannot control their venom, who are caught in corrupt systems without maturity—makes them more dangerous than openly hostile opponents. Yet even within corrupt systems, individuals like Joseph of Arimathea demonstrate that what matters is action: "If you say you believe certain things, you better act like it."
Questions Raised:
How does understanding God's creative power as spoken word rather than cosmic violence reshape our theology of judgment and salvation?
What is the relationship between claiming righteousness (through titles, positions, institutional authority) and actually embodying it through consistent action?
If "baby snakes" are more dangerous because they're unpredictable and can't control their venom, how do we distinguish between those caught in corrupt systems who might reform them versus those who perpetuate corruption?
How does the Hebrew imagination's "one from afar" challenge our assumptions about divine authority emerging from familiar, institutional sources?
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Isaiah 11:1-10
1 And there shall come forth a rod out of the root of Jesse, and a blossom shall come up from his root: 2 and the Spirit of YHWH shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength, the spirit of knowledge and godliness shall fill him; 3 the spirit of the fear of YHWH. He shall not Sh-P-T according to appearance, nor reprove according to report: 4 but he shall judge the cause of the lowly, and shall reprove the lowly of the earth: and he shall strike the earth with the word of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he destroy the ungodly one. 5 And he shall have his loins girded with righteousness, and his sides clothed with truth. 6 And the wolf shall feed with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the young calf and bull and lion shall feed together; and a little child shall lead them. 7 And the ox and bear shall feed together; and their young shall be together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 And an infant shall put his hand on the holes of asps, and on the nest of young asps. 9 And they shall not hurt, nor shall they at all be able to destroy any one on my holy mountain: for the whole [universe] is filled with the knowledge of YHWH, as much water covers the seas. 10 And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, and they shall arise as [ archō] of All Peoples; in him shall the People trust, and his rest shall be glorious.
Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
1 O God(s), give your Sh-P-T to the king, and your Ts-D-Q-ness to the king's son;
2 that he may judge [am (H5971) The People](https://www.notion.so/am-H5971-The-People-2a9c47d5c5aa809babb1ccdf2462bfbd?pvs=21) with righteousness, and the worst off with your Sh-P-T.
3 Let the mountains and the hills raise [harmony] to [am (H5971) The People](https://www.notion.so/am-H5971-The-People-2a9c47d5c5aa809babb1ccdf2462bfbd?pvs=21):
4 he shall Sh-P-T the worst off of The People in Ts-D-Q-ness, and Y-Sh-A the children of the needy; and shall crush those who oppress.
5 And he shall continue as long as the sun, and before the moon for ever.
6 He shall come down as rain upon a fleece; and as drops falling upon the earth.
7 In his days shall righteousness spring up; and abundance of peace till the moon be removed.
18 Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who alone does wonders.
19 And blessed is his glorious name for ever, even for ever and ever: and all the earth shall be filled with his glory. So be it, so be it.
Romans 15:4-13
4 For whatever things were written before were written for our learning, that through perseverance and through encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. 5 Now the God of perseverance and of encouragement grant you to be of the same mind with one another according to Christ Joshua, 6 that with one accord you may with one mouth glorify the God and Father of our Lord Joshua Christ.
7 Therefore accept one another, even as Christ also accepted you,* to the glory of God. 8 Now I say that Christ has been made a servant of the circumcision for the truth of God, that he might confirm the promises given to the fathers, 9 and that All People might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written,
“Therefore I will give praise to you among All Peoples and sing to your name.”
10 Again he says, “Rejoice, All People, with Regular Folk.”
11 Again, “Praise the Lord, All People! Let all the Regular Folk praise him.”
12 Again, Book of Isaiah says, “There will be the root of Jesse, he who arises to rule over the All People; in him All People will hope.”
13 Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope in the power of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 3:1-12
1 In those days, John the Baptizer came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, 2 “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!” 3 For this is he who was spoken of by Book of Isaiah the prophet, saying,
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness, make the way of the Lord ready! Make his paths straight!”
4 Now John himself wore clothing made of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. 5 Then people from Jerusalem, all of Judea, and all the region around The Jordan went out to him. 6 They were baptized by him in the Jordan, confessing their sins.
7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, “You little snakes, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 You want salvation? Then produce fruit worthy of repentance! 9 Don’t even think, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ because God is able to raise up children to Abra[ha]m from these stones. 10 Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit is cut down, and cast into the fire.
11 “Im gonna baptize you in water for repentance, but he who comes after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you in the Holy Spirit. 12 His broom is in hand, and he’s gonna sweep up his work shop. He will gather his harvest into the barn, but the rest is headed to the compost.”
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All right, welcome to Advent 2 of Year A. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon.
I have not welcomed you to First Formation because I am in the process of—as I said last week—rebooting the flagship podcast for Grunt Works. First Formation was the dailies of the lectionary, the scraps that fall from the table. Now that I'm starting on the Sundays in Year A, I'm rebooting it and thinking of calling the podcast Fighting Words.
If you tuned in last week or clicked the show notes, you were probably taken to PQHQ.com/tfw, which is the holding space for everything biblical that I'm doing. TFW—The Fighting Word—is what I call my exegetical project, a paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures.
The Fighting Word has every book outlined, but nothing filled in yet. As I go along the lectionary, I'll be filling in those scriptures with a public domain translation—so I'm not pissing anybody off—but I'm going to be changing some things to my liking, to my hermeneutic. This is not something I'm going to sell. I think in particular the Bible, since I'm using a public domain version, you can access it, read it, listen along. But when I read from this public domain text, I'm going to be slightly altering it for the podcast, for Fighting Words.
I might be inviting some interviews like I did with Grunt God, but I do all this because I did the dailies for however many years and I got really comfortable with the Bible. I started to see things.
One of the first things I saw that helped me begin having even more confidence in the Bible is the Armor of God. The Armor of God—the Divine Warrior motif—is a series of sayings in the Old Testament and New Testament, or the Hebrew Bible and Christian scriptures, that attribute to God pieces of armor. I love this because it's very modular. You can see the trajectory of it, the tradition, the motif developing in the canon, beginning with Isaiah 11.
I'll leave a link to the Training Room essay on the Armor of God. You can scroll down and see all the details. Isaiah 11—when you read about the Armor of God, say from Thomas Yoder Neufeld, who did a dissertation on it—the discussion usually starts with Paul in Ephesians: "Put on the whole armor of God," et cetera. Isaiah 11 is often left out, but the two through lines of the entire Armor of God motif are the breastplate of righteousness (tsedek in Hebrew, thorax soteria in Greek) and the helmet of salvation. Those are the two that appear throughout.
Isaiah 11 in Proto-Isaiah—the first of the three sections of Isaiah's texts—begins it. The figure is either Yahweh himself or this root of Jesse. Jesse is David's father. David was the youngest of Jesse's eight sons, so this "root" is kind of tongue-in-cheek referring to King David, describing David in Messianic terms. Isaiah comes after David, reflecting back on the Davidic dynasty, which has its own problems. But this is the earliest appearance in the canon.
Isaiah predates the other Old Testament passages like Wisdom of Solomon chapter 5, Ephesians, 1 Thessalonians. The other big one is Isaiah 59:17. Remember those two things—the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation—because it's all pieces of clothing. When Scripture describes the priestly vestments in Exodus 32, there are some interesting parallels in the Hebrew and Greek. I'll leave you to check out the Armor of God essay on the Training Room, the blog of PQHQ.
In Isaiah 11:4: "He will judge the cause of the lowly and reprove the lowly of the earth. He shall strike the earth with the word of his mouth"—the logos, the logic (because many languages have words with dual or multiple meanings)—"and with the breath of his lips he shall destroy the ungodly one."
The first thing I think of is Genesis, when God creates. The Hebrew God—the product of the Hebrew imagination—in Hebrew, Ivri means "one who crosses over from beyond," an alien or transgressor. In Greek it just transliterates as Hebraios, but Ivri means the one from afar in the Hebrew language. Think Abraham—different consonants but similar sounds: Abram and Ivri. Hebrew means someone from far away, a foreigner. They do this crossing over.
This unique imagination that the Hebrews cultivated with the Semitic language presents their God in direct contrast to the Babylonian Enuma Elish, the Epic of Gilgamesh, all these other creation myths which almost always feature gods fighting and wrestling, battling to see who's going to rule humanity. Gods are the things we attribute to what we can't explain. If I can't explain why I win in victory or lose my house, if it's not my fault, it must be God's fault. In the most fundamental sense, God is a symbol for the miraculous, the things we can't describe.
But the Hebrew God? There's no battle, no ripping other gods apart. In other myths, the blood of the gods creates humans. The Hebrew God just says, "Let there be light," and there's light, and it's good. This confronts what Augustine calls the privation of evil.
The social conflict theory that fueled the Babylonian, Mesopotamian, and dominant cultural assumptions about the unknown was that we fought for what we have. The gods must have fought for us, before us. The Hebrew God doesn't have to do any of that. That's how powerful this God is—just a word uttered, a breath, conquers all these other gods, sets creation in place through mere divine intent and divine creativity.
From the very beginning, if you believe in a universe determined by conflict, that's not the Hebrew imagination. That's a worldly imagination. I say "worldly" in Hebrew because in the translations in Psalms and Isaiah, I've taken the Hebrew goy and goyim and made them slightly different.
For goy and goyim, I've said "all peoples." That's my translation, because when we say goy and goyim as "the nations" in Greek—that's ethnos—ethnos is almost like a tribe: my people. All the people are us and everybody else. "All peoples."
Then am is something collective as one. Just like when Jacob has his name changed to Israel, and Israel becomes both a singular and plural reference. Am is the whole people, the people. If the Constitution of America were written in Hebrew, it would begin with am. It's transliterated as "am" but it's a Hebrew root meaning the collected grouping of the people. You'll hear me say "the people" for am and "all peoples" for goy and goyim.
Some other things I think are important to point out, especially with John the Baptist: There are young snakes mentioned earlier in Isaiah. If you know snakes—my dad was a science teacher and kept snakes—baby snakes can't control their venom and don't know what's going on. They're more dangerous than mature snakes because mature snakes will probably run from you. Young snakes might go after you because they don't know any better, and when they bite, they can't control the venom. They might inject more, might kill you. They're unpredictable.
Here, John the Baptist says, "You brood of young snakes"—it's diminutive. Not only are the Pharisees and Sadducees less predictable, they're more dangerous than regular mature snakes.
The Sadducees—this is another reason I'm creating The Fighting Word, to hyperlink some of this language we've lost track of. Forget the word "Sadducees" in Greek. It's Tzadikim, a transliteration of Tzedek, which means "righteous." The Sadducees went out of their way to claim righteousness in a politically corrupt system. They were political appointments of Herod. They used the name Tzedek not only because it means "righteous"—they were claiming "we are the righteous ones," literally—but it also connects to the first temple of Solomon.
Zadok was the high priest who built Solomon's temple. The Zadokite dynasty goes from Zadok—at least according to the Bible and apocryphal literature—who helped build the first temple, all the way through Joshua and Jehozadak and Jeshua in the second temple, all the way to the Hasmonean Maccabees. Then it stops.
Not long before Jesus was born, the Zadokite dynasty was destroyed. There was infighting. Herod had already begun taking power, and he said, "We're not going to have any more hereditary high priests. I'm going to control who controls the temple."
So Caiaphas, a Sadducee, is not a Zadokite. Joshua son of Miriam (Mary), and Miriam and Elizabeth are daughters of Aaron—even further back than Zadokite, the Aaronic dynasty—Joshua and Caiaphas stand and face each other, and everybody knows who was appointed and who was anointed.
We lose sight of some of this. We just think, "Oh, the Sadducees were this thing." They were claiming something by that name.
The Pharisees were teachers, itinerant preachers and priests. Some were bad, some were good. You could say that Jesus—or Joshua, his Hebrew name as opposed to his Latin name—Joshua was a Pharisee. He was an itinerant preacher, just like his relative John. Not all Pharisees were good, not all Pharisees were bad.
Sadducees, however, held political power and were exploiting language and culture to hold onto power. But even that didn't completely undermine them, because Joseph of Arimathea—who buries Joshua after the Passion—he's a Sadducee.
You can't just dismiss the people in power, whether that's a Sadducee or an emperor or a general like Naaman the Syrian. You can't do it. You have to look not at the outer appearance. You have to look at them themselves. What have they done? Do they deserve our respect and trust and attention?
I think earlier in this reading we talked about how God does not judge by appearance. God judges by what comes out of the heart. What do you do?
Sadducees' hearts were mostly corrupted. They wanted power. They wanted to hold onto power. Not all of them. Some were caught up in the system and were open to seeing how the system needed to be reformed, like Joseph of Arimathea. Or even if Joseph were a total douchebag, he did what he needed to do. He followed the law. If you die before sundown, you have to be buried.
So even if Joseph were the worst of the worst, what the text—not here but elsewhere—points out is: What matters is what you do. What matters is whether, if you say you believe certain things, you better act like it. If you believe in righteousness, if you believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, you better live consistently with it.
If you don't, that's what makes you unpredictable and dangerous and a baby snake.
