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I am about to create new heavens and a new earth. … I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.

March 28, 2022

Isaiah 65:17–25 | John 4:43–54 | Psalm 30:1–6,11–13

My initial response to today’s reading from Isaiah was “This world he tells us God is creating is hardly a place for people!” How do children in this idyllic world learn about gravity if they’re never injured falling from trees or bicycles? If the wolves and lions are eating grass how is God managing the reproductive rate of rabbits – without taking away the joy of being a rabbit in the new wolf-free zone? How can hundred-year-old “youths”, who have never suffered, truly treasure their loved ones if they’ve never lost one? How do they learn how precious each day is if they never have confidence-toppling medical wake-up calls from which we hopefully learn and try to reprioritize our time and energy? Will they be deprived of all the experiences we humans look back at and thank God that we survived? How will they know what to be thankful for? What will they base their relationships on? It’s hard for me to imagine a world where we wouldn’t need some shared struggles to feel “we’re all in this together”.

I get that Isaiah is trying to paint a picture, in limited human language, of a transformative experience humans could never imagine, by using imagery that is attractive to… whom? From what the near-hundred-year-old people I work with tell me, this metaphor sounds exhausting! Maybe it needed to be unbelievable though, to catch our attention as we are too wrapped up in the world we know, when we are clinging to the idea that we will have spare time in the future to do the things God beckons us to now, when we might like to imagine having way past 100 years to figure it all out, or better yet that in the “next” world, God will uncomplicate things and we won’t have to? Isaiah, after all his stark warnings, painted this over-the-top picture that 26 centuries later still has our attention. Should we imagine it as a Disney-esque fantasy, or an invitation?

Having spent a fair amount of time with people who are dying, or believe they’re dying, (and having been blindsided with the possibility myself, and relieved), I’ve encountered two kinds of dying people: the ones who thought they had longer, and suddenly realizing time is up, are panicked and despairing over what seems unfinished, and the ones looking forward to “going home”, and laying down the now-heavy provisions of their human journey.

Isaiah quoted God saying he will create “…it’s people as a delight”. Some years ago, in one of the most humbling and awe-inspiring experiences of my life, I held a human brain in my hands for the first time. The brain of a man who envisioned a time he wouldn’t need it. And as a speech pathology student preparing for my specialization in brain injury rehabilitation, here I was, cradling it in my fingers – this brain which once coursed with electrochemical reactions on an unimaginable scale, with which this man took every breath and perceived every conscious moment of his 75-year life. I imagined that this brain, now silent in my hands, stored memories of his mother’s voice, deciphered the jokes of his childhood friends, coordinated muscles for the trajectory of a baseball, recorded all the skills of his work, let him feel his arms wrapped around a partner he loved, preserved the smells of his newborn children, and allowed him, through some combination of life experience and faith, to form his concept of, and relationship with, God. 

Is this space within us, at the same time tiny and vast, what God can make of the mere molecules, the “dust”, from which we come? Is this the gate, where God knocks, and if we open it, brings the Holy Spirit through to reside? Has God put the mountain inside, not out? Do we even know what a mountain is? And with the Holy Spirit animating the thoughts and actions of this dust, could we begin letting go the old paradigms of necessary suffering, and would the new wonder of what God has made us be our source of gratitude? Is our task to carry some of the world Isaiah was shown, into the world Isaiah lived in, before our human form returns to dust and the neurons go silent? A world where we might, as God seems to, see every person as already divine – as God’s delight? Must we absorb the new Jerusalem before it absorbs us? Can God put God’s world anywhere, and any-when? Not just in God’s hands, as the old song goes, but through Christ and with Christ and in Christ, in ours?

Sarah Curtis