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Isaiah 65.17-21
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress. No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed. They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
This passage is so joyful, so full of hope, and yet it troubles me. God is making a promise – a New Jerusalem! – but in that promise lies the certainty of destruction. The old Jerusalem will be wiped away, from the earth and from our minds. For a phoenix to rise from the ashes, don’t you first have to have a fire? And indeed, in the verses previous to these God promises destruction and revenge. This passage is not a promise to heal, but to start over.
This desire to scrap the whole thing and start over carries a rueful kind of resonance for me, especially over the last year. 2020 left me few places to hide from my own inadequacies, and indeed afforded me further opportunities to develop new ones. More than once I’ve looked in the mirror and wondered if there wasn’t some kind of reset button I could hit, a return to factory settings. I feel this on a selfish, petty level for myself; I feel it on an overwhelmingly sorrowful level for the world. Even before the pandemic, hadn’t we already befouled the Old Jerusalem beyond saving? Did it not seem as though we were ever more passionate architects of our own destruction, hastening the moment when we’d be balled up and thrown in the trash?
But the passage here focuses on the joy of the fresh, clean sheet of paper, the return of God to the drawing board, having learned from His mistakes, or from ours. But a saying springs to mind: God don’t make no junk. Maybe that’s just a folksy way of saying “matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed.” God exists in and through all things, and is ever experimenting, becoming new forms of His eternal, undimmable energy. Seen in this light, it becomes unnecessary to mourn the old Jerusalem, or to worry about it at all. The new will be built from the matter of the old, just as spring arrives through the mulch of last year’s grass, as we take up palms that will be next years ashes. Life, eternal, springing through new and ever more joyous forms.
