O
Root of Jesse, Who
dost stand for an ensign of the people, before Whom kings shall keep silence,
and unto Whom the Gentiles shall make their supplication: come to deliver us,
and tarry not.
The House of Jesse was a stump. That’s where this majestic passage from
Isaiah 11 begins. God had revealed this
to Isaiah, when to all outward appearances, it seemed likely to have a fairly
secure future. He’s talking about the
royal house, Israel’s line of kings.
Jesse was the father of David, the greatest of kings, and it was David’s
descendants who ruled in Jerusalem in Isaiah’s time. It will become a stump, Isaiah begins, cut
off violently after so many warnings went unheeded. The patience of God would be exhausted, and
it would fall like a great tree in the forest.
And great trees, generally, do not rise again. The ruin of
what once was, the death of a promising future.
It’s the natural lesson of this time of year, of course, when the
greenery of summer is dying off. The
trees have shed their leaves, and the wind whips through the branches, and the
sap moves very slowly if it moves at all.
It’s dark and cold, and life seems chased from the earth.
And then, God decides to do something new. That’s the story of Israel, the record played
a hundred times over. Abraham was an old
man with a barren wife. Joseph had been
betrayed by His brother, bound in an Egyptian prison. For ten generations, the Hebrews had made
bricks and drawn water in the shadows of the pyramids. David, the youngest son, was left out with
the sheep, not fit to be seen by the holy prophet. The kingdom was hacked in two, the temple
burnt, the walls pulled down, the people hauled off a thousand miles from their
homeland, and left in the dark for a seventy-year winter. She was a virgin, a simple woman, from a
modest village. But this is our God, and
as one thinker put it, His promise is never quite so secure as when all hope
seems to be lost.
A branch will spring from the stump. The root will live again. And that’s of course, why we will fill the
Church with flowers in two weeks’ time.
It’s why we marvel over the poinsettia and the Glastonbury thorn, the
miracle renewed every winter, the miracle of our God’s power and love. “It came a flowret bright, amid the cold of winter,
when half-spent was the night.[1]”
They called Him the Branch, this promised ruler. Jeremiah had spoken of His day, a new kind of
king, who would fulfill the potential never quite realized in old David’s
motley brood. He would summon the people
back to their native land, and establish God’s rule in a new and powerful
way. Under His authority there would be
great justice and lasting peace. He
would be the little child who leads them, young and fresh, and yet ruling with
everlasting power.
Is He the rod of Jesse or the root of Jesse? You might have
noticed the difference between the antiphon and the hymn. Both of them are right there in the text, a
rod at the beginning of the oracle and a root at the end. It certainly didn’t bother the medieval
commentators who find it one of the most fortuitous coincidences in all of
sacred writing. He is the root because
He was before all things, because the authority handed first to Jesse’s son was
based on His purpose. But He is the rod
as well, the sign of what has begun now and is yet to come. And because, in Latin, rod is virga, which is
an awful lot like virgine, the
Virgin, you can ring the changes again. He
is root, and He is rod, and He is flower as well, the full glory of God’s
purpose for human life.
But flowers are fragile of course. You’d better bundle poinsettias if you want
to get them home safely these days. And
in His first coming, He certainly revealed authority and glory to us. But He was fragile as well, willing to suffer
for us in this cold and barren world.
It’s interesting, that the antiphon speaks, as Isaiah 11 of the root as
an ensign for the peoples, the standard that unites them together in a common
hope. But then it speaks of Him as one
“before whom kings keep silence.” And
that’s a quote, not from this chapter of Isaiah’s prophecy, but from his 52rd
chapter, the one we read at the Solemn Liturgy on Good Friday.
“His appearance was so marred, beyond human
semblance,” we read there, “and his form beyond that of the sons of men-- so shall
he startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him… For he grew up before him
like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or
comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men; a
man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their
faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”[2]
The
root is there again, of course, but it’s a root that was soon cut down, the
kings look and are silent, because they don’t know how to answer the depth of
His suffering. He is the root and the
branch, but on that day, He was also the stump, hung upon the tree of death,
taking onto Himself that whole long history of God’s rejected and forsaken
people.
He
came out of love for them, and He died for them. And yet, borrowing from Saint John, “when He
came to His own they received Him not.”[3] And so, this is the prophecy is the place
where Saint Paul turns, in Romans,[4]
when He’s trying to make sense of His experience in the mission field. He goes and proclaims Christ in the
synagogue, the descendant of David, the long promised branch, He has come to
the help of His servant Israel. And what
do they do in the synagogue, they chase him away. They want nothing to do with this crucified
Savior.
And
so, Saint Paul goes instead to the Gentiles, to strange foreign people with
their crude and backward ways. And they,
in the words of the antiphon, “they make their supplication” to Jesus. They cry to Him for mercy, they acclaim Him
with faith. And again the branch rises from the stump, again the fragile
promise of our steadfast God bursts into glorious flower.
This
is how it will be for us. He has not
left us with any illusions about this.
He said if you wish to follow me, deny yourself, and take up your cross.[5] Come live with me in rejection, come and face
disappointment. But know this, when you
think all is lost, when you know there can be no more life. When the future seems a closed door—“amid the
cold of winter, when half-spent was the night.”
Then, I will be there, to raise a new shoot, and show you more than you
ever dreamed to see.
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