I omitted to note the artist of this sculpted relief in the first gallery of Aberdeen Art Gallery. (I'll put that right next time I'm there.) This relief was on the reverse side of a main sculpture, and I was intrigued by the image of lion and lamb. "The lion shall lie down with the lamb" is a frequent misquotation of Isaiah 11.6. But here's the full text:
"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them."
But allowing for the misquotation, and remembering that the Lion and Lamb are key symbols in the book of Revelation, for the risen Christ and the sacrifice of Christ, I read verses like this as intentional subversion of our pessimism, despair, resignation and culpable giving in to the dominant realities of our times. You know them; they dominate our ever-present news feeds.
Isaiah, and the book of Revelation are texts that teach us to question and resist those dominant realities, ideologies of oppression and greed, political and military actions of violence, and the use and abuse of words and images to foment hate and cruelty in order to dehumanise other people and peoples.
Time after time the Prophets point to an alternative way of ordering our politics and power in ways that make for peace. Of course, the Prophets looked on the world and history with God on the horizon. I confess, so do I - "God help us" is less a pious expletive than a genuine cry of the heart.
And so I pray "Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And yes, allowing for the slippage of images, I can settle for a vision of the lion lying down with the lamb, because I pray to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and to the Lion of the tribe of Judah who triumphed over death.
And so I pray for our world, its wolves and lambs, leopards and goats, lions and calves. And I do so because in ways beyond our knowing and his, Isaiah looked to the impossible possibility of a child leading and saving a broken world; "For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself..." Or so it seems to me.
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