Isaiah 64:1-9 More Magical Thinking

(Lectionary for Advent 1, December 3, 2017)

The days preceding Christmas are often referred to as “days of magic.” Lights go up on houses, the stores are filled with artificial trees, festooned with plastic balls and phony flocking, while shoppers are serenaded with holiday tunes played by 101 Strings or Mannheim Steamroller. And old Bing Crosby lends his dulcet voice while refusing to sing any rhythms as written. Some may not find any magic in this feast of commerce, but the word magic is tossed about willy-nilly anyway. As the big day draws near, despite our attraction more to goodies than the Good News of Jesus’ birth, even the most curmudgeonly of Scrooges can feel a tiny thrill of magic—surely!

But that sort of magic is finally not what I wish to think about on this first Advent Sunday. I read the Hebrew Bible text from Isaiah, and I am aghast at the magical thinking enshrined in the prophet’s ancient words. “O that you would rip open the skies and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence, as when fire kindles brush, like a fire causing water to boil, in order to make your name known to your adversaries, so that nations might tremble at your presence” (Is.64:1-2)! This is on the face of it nothing less than a request for divine vengeance against Israel’s enemies, a mirror of the appalling demands of the poet of Psalm 137 to “take (Babylonian) babies and bash them against rocks!” Any nation that has the temerity to attack, to assault, to dare conquer the chosen Israel will surely get it in the neck from an enraged YHWH. Of course, such demands say far more about the aggrieved Israel than they do about any supposed fury of God. God becomes in such language the stooge of a people who are tired of being kicked around by larger forces against whom they have no chance of survival. Such people want their God to destroy enemies whom they themselves cannot destroy.

Isaiah claims that YHWH has done such deeds in the past, perhaps having in mind the iconic event at the Sea of Reeds where a motley crew of desperate escapees from Egypt defeat the mightiest army in the world through the power of YHWH over nature. “Do it again, YHWH,” as my old Hebrew Bible professor, Kermit Schoonover, summarized the entire story of Israel; bring on the divine magic, since we are not capable of winning anything on our own. Well, perhaps it is not so evil to ask YHWH to help a struggling people against forces completely beyond their control. However, by the end of this scene in Isaiah the demands on YHWH become very dark indeed.

“Your holy cities have become wilderness; Jerusalem is a desolation. Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire; all our pleasant places have become ruins. After all this, will you restrain yourself, YHWH? Will you keep silent, and punish us so severely” (Is.64:11-12)? Come on, YHWH, they cry! How can you remain hidden and silent in the face of a smoldering temple, a blasted holy city, a devastated land of promise? And just why are you punishing us? Should you not be attacking those who did this to us? Those repulsive and alien Babylonians are your enemy and ours. What sort of wimpy God are you?

And there you have it as plain as day: if God is really God, then destruction of the enemy is God’s business. And, by implication, if the enemy is not destroyed, then YHWH is finally no God at all. Well, what about that?

To imagine that God must act in the petty and vindictive ways that I wish I could act is nothing less than magical thinking, and disgusting magical thinking at that. The theological import of such thinking is as follows: the God I wish to worship is only a mirror of my own desires, my own limited ideas of the way I think the world should be. In short, I create God in my own image, not the other way around. Such a God can only be some sort of idol, a projection of my own worst traits into the sky, precisely the God that Freud or Feuerbach announced that any God finally was, a furious father raised into the heavens.

But is that finally who God must be? If so, we should all turn our hearts to something else when we worship, for if God is only my nation’s pet, or a larger and more powerful me, a thing to be manipulated by my desires, that cannot be God. Isaiah here, whichever Isaiah he may be, has offered to us no God worthy of the name. His claims of chapter 64 must be roundly rejected. It just may be, oddly enough, that the strange God of Christmas is the antidote to this Isaianic non-God.

Any God who decides to show up as a baby in an animal’s smelly straw bed rather than appear as a being of power, tearing the skies in two in a grand display of divine awesomeness, shaking a stick of thunder and a sword of lightening in the faces of any who dare to question the coming wrath, is not a God made in my image. In the world I inhabit, I want no more babies, “mewling and puking in his mother’s milk.” I want Superman; I want Wonder Woman. Give me the Immortal Gods who will smash their way through my enemies and remake the world as I want it to be. Sweet little Jesus boy will simply not cut it! Give me magical power, for our enemies are too vast, too strong, too invincible. But what we get is a baby, a tiny baby, and that must be for us who love God enough. It does not look like enough. We would rather have parting waters, magic food, flaming bushes, earthquakes and storms to bring us back into the fold. But what we get is a baby, and that must be enough. The child will be magic enough for us, and will help us to rid ourselves of that silly magical thinking that leads only to weakness and apathy and disaster. In another earlier part of Isaiah, a prophet announces “a little child will lead them.” And so he will, if we allow ourselves to be led by such a peculiar and wonderful God. It is that God for whom we wait in this and every Advent.