· Isaiah 35:1-10
· Psalm 146:5-10 (8)
· James 5:7-10
· Matthew 11:2-11
"A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people."
Interesting.
Actually, there are now highways [scare quotes gesture] "for God's people." In Palestine. They have highways for the Israeli, and... goat tracks, really, for the Palestinians.
Last week we read about the peaceful Kingdom of God:
"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." (Isaiah 11:6-9)
I find it interesting that the lectionary put these two readings in sequence, in the context of the world as we know it. God made promises through the prophets, but we've taken it upon ourselves to make some of these promises come true, now, in our own way. So we have highways for God's people, on which the unclean shall not travel. Not only that, but we open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf with surgeries. We can make prosthetic legs that run faster than natural legs. The burning sands are turned into pools in places like Arizona, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. Golf courses, too. I don't know if the haunt of any jackals has become a swamp recently, but immense tracts of habitats have been turned from the use of animals into ours – or just into poisonous wastelands.
But...
What about the Peaceful Kingdom? Are we any closer?
No.
I'm pretty sure we're getting further and further, actually. Certainly the highways in Palestine are the very opposite of the Peaceful Kingdom. All these things we do with medicine? None of that is good for peace. When Isaiah wrote down his prophecies, there were a few million people in the world. There was enough for everyone to live in a land of milk and honey, somewhere or other. Now we're seven billion and the land and water are dramatically degraded. Why? Because we've taken it into our own hands to end death. We refuse to die, so we grow exponentially. We didn't just "multiply" as the Lord told us; we've grown like a mold, or a cancer. We're destroying the organism that is supporting our life. Because we refuse to die.
Remember what happened in the Garden of Eden?
Then the Lord God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever" – therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:22-24)
Humans living forever is exactly what the Lord was trying to prevent. We didn't get kicked out of the Garden as a punishment, but to prevent us living forever. Why? Because God is jealous and doesn't want us to have good things? No. On the contrary, God wanted us to be able to continue enjoying the good things of Creation. People ask, why does God allow suffering and death? Because we cannot live without them. Without death, we overrun the Earth and poison it. And yet we still die. The more causes of death we overcome, the more new ones we find. In the Fat World, or First World, I suppose it's called, we no longer die of things like smallpox, typhoid, leprosy, polio, plague, cholera, starvation, or being torn by wild beasts or gored by oxen. Not much, anyway. So what? Instead we have diabetes, cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer, and MRSA. We keep children indoors, under constant adult supervision, we child-proof everything, we teach them hundreds of safety rules, we vet their friends, their friends' parents, their teachers, their coaches, we protect them from every danger, real or imaginary, including the embarrassment of getting a lousy grade in school when they deserve it. Then what? They grow fat and helpless, they live their whole lives nursing their vulnerable egos, and then they get diabetes and heart disease. We still suffer and die, we just take longer and cost a lot more resources doing it. And when we live to a great age, we retire from our labours, and then society bemoans the fact that seniors have low incomes and high medical costs. End-of-life facilities are multiplying, but they're filling as fast as they can be built. And when we look at the people who are nearing retirement now, they're much heavier and riddled with "diseases of riches" than their parents, so the people entering into care are more and more high-maintenance.
And all this costs resources. For the price of a heart transplant, you could vaccinate a quarter million children in the Third World, or Thin World. The OAS and GIS payments to one senior would sponsor 42 children through World Vision or other relief organizations. But then what? We're saving them so we can industrialise them, which will kill them anyway. And while we try to "improve" their lives, by which we mean make them more than ours, others are working just as hard to keep them in poverty, to maintain the imbalance that makes our industrial lifestyle possible.
God gave us death as a gift. God gave us a good life and a good world where all could live richly and peacefully – and then die a timely death and be reunited with the Spirit of God. But we want more. We always wanted more. There were just two trees we couldn't touch in the whole Garden, and we had to have those. Whatever God gives us, we have never, ever been satisfied with it. We say we trust God, but we don't. God, in his wisdom, knows what's good for us. We always want more, and if he doesn't give it to us we'll take it for ourselves. We make noise with our mouths, saying we trust God, but we don't.
I suggest we talk less about how much we love Jesus, and obey the will of the Lord more.
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