Killing the Wicked

Second Sunday of Advent Year A RCL

Isaiah 11:1-4 NRSV

A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him,

the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the spirit of counsel and might,

the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide by what his ears hear;

but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

Killing the Wicked
(and Other Joyous Thoughts Regarding the Coming Judgment)

For the ancient Jews, as well as for any of us moderns who were terrorized by the phrase, “You just wait until your father gets home!”, the coming of the Messiah was a downright scary thing.

As the prophet Amos put it…

“Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light,

    and gloom with no brightness in it?”
-Amos 5:20 (NRSV)

There is a similar story from the American Civil War. Supposedly a young Confederate soldier committed a significantly serious offense that he was brought before General Robert E. Lee. The young man was shaking with fear and the general tried to set him at ease.

“You have nothing to fear, son. You will receive justice here.”

The young rebel swallowed hard and supposedly replied, “Yes, sir. That’s what I’m afraid of.”

In short, the arrival of God’s Messiah and the coming of the great and terrible Day of the Lord was no laughing matter as almost everyone was going to do downright badly on THAT final exam.

But not everyone.

In the lesson from Isaiah, the poor and the meek will see some good from it: the religious, economic, political and societal systems of injustice that afflicted them will be overthrown and they will receive from God what they've not received from the rulers of the world.

The Messiah will arrive and establish their just treatment.

And how will the Messiah do that?

Simply kill the wicked who perpetuate those unjust, oppressive, de-humanizing systems.

Sounds simple enough, if a bit untidy (See “Revelation, the Book of). And we've all seem enough vigilante movies to get a feel for what that would look like on a global scale.

When one writes a novel, there are three ways it can end.

You can give your readers what they expect. That works, but it’s a bit boring.

You can give your readers something they DON’T expect… but that risks losing them completely.

You know, boy meets girl. Boy falls out with girl. Boy begins to work out relationship with girl but then she is kidnapped by aliens.

Hard to pull off.

The most satisfying way to end a story is to give your readers what they expect – but NOT in the way they expected it.

In the Christian cosmic narrative, this is what God did in Jesus Christ.

Christ is God’s mighty warrior come to earth to slay the wicked, reverse their injustices and ensure the justice for the poor and meek.

But Christ is also the vulnerable baby born in poverty who, per the infancy stories – which are really the gospels-in-miniature – must be evacuated to safety by his parents.

He fulfills the expectation of Messiah, but in an unanticipated, even counter-intuitive way.

To get a grasp on that, one could do worse than meditate – on the occasion of his death – on the life of Nelson Mandela.

Nelson Mandela worked throughout his life to lead South Africa out of apartheid and into responsible, representative, self-government.

His personal religious beliefs are somewhat mysterious and – at one point in the fight – he allowed for the resistance of force against the apartheid regime.

And yet, when finally freed after 27 years of incarceration and ascending to the presidency of South Africa, it was reconciliation, not vengeance, that guided his policies.

As the movie, “Invictus,” so dramatically portrays, Nelson Mandela did not see his white jailers or the white functionaries of the apartheid government he had helped overthrow as the enemy. He saw them as captives of the TRUE enemy – the fallen ideology of apartheid.

Despite his lack of explicit, religious expression, he may well have agreed the author of Ephesians who said, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12 (NRSV)

He showed that there are two ways of killing the wicked.

By actually killing them which, at one point in his life, he was apparently prepared to do.

Or by disarming that which holds them captive to wickedness, as he did when he assumed power.

Nelson Mandela surprised both his friends and his enemies when he gave them exactly what they expected in a way they totally DID NOT expect.

And he is a fitting entry point into our Advent meditations regarding God’s judgment on the wicked during this time of preparation for God’s Messiah – no matter how unexpected a disguise that Messiah might present.