Earth Knowledge

There’s a verse in Isaiah that has always spoken to me and, I suspect, a lot of people, for its sheer poetry, opening up an acutely wonderful idea.

“The earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.” (11:9)

Because it is so poetic it could be dismissed as little more, a lucid metaphor for a flight of fancy or, at best, something real but postponed for a long-distant supernatural future.

But I’d like to report that at the end of our last bible study we stood in a circle with our eyes shut and our hands spread before us palm upwards, and we felt the reality of an earth, a physical environment, that communicated the deep presence of God.

Don’t get me wrong. This is no claim to a mystical experience or to a special ritual for initiates of Wood Hath Hope. That is precisely why I’m reporting it: because it is not that. Because this thing belongs to everyone.

We were studying the book of Isaiah, from the point of view of the temple, and we were seeing how for the whole book of Isaiah the temple is not really important, but the city which surrounds it is. The Book of Isaiah exalts the city of Zion, of Jerusalem, as the place where God’s plan for the earth and humankind will be accomplished. It involves such marvelous features as the end to war, the end of violence (including among animals), the abundance of food and wine to drink for everyone, all the way to the end of death itself. These elements of biblical prophecy have been consistently played down in favor of the “heavenly elsewhere” of Platonized theology, and of standard church preaching and popular imagination. And why not? It is so much easier to get people to believe in, and pay coin for, some mechanism of a happy afterlife rather than an unlikely metamorphosis of the crappy present one.

But what I’m talking about is not a matter of preaching, of playing to the cultural preconceptions of a mass culture whose preconceptions the Christian church has helped reinforce. (By the way, when did Jesus ever talk about “going to heaven when you die”?). Rather it is the here and now transformation of our constructed sense experience by the power of the Word, by the power of a set of signs and symbols which speak to and release our deepest earthly truth.

In concrete what this means is that when we stood on the earth in the power of Isaiah’s words we stood on an earth freed from violence and death. And when we placed our hands and fingers out into the air we were touching molecules set free from the futility of death by the Holy Spirit of love. These are not false or phantasmal experiences, but the shaping of our highly moldable sense apparatus (technically it’s called neural plasticity) by the redemptive speech of the bible working in and through the Risen Christ.

There’s a feedback loop from the inspired language to our bodies passing through the new creation that Christ has already is. Indeed if Christ is physically risen what other earthly reality could Christians possible refer to except the one that is radically transformed in him?

The feeling may only last for the few moments in the slipstream of the study and its signs, but we remember it and know it’s there and are able continually to base our actions in it.

And that is why we “study”: reading and thinking about these written signs, in and through Christ, enables our human senses to be continually formed and re-formed until new creation becomes second nature.

Imagine what would happen to the Christian movement if every time Christians met they placed themselves in the power of the Word within a transformed earth!