IN THAT DAY – Vv. 17 and 18 portray God as the Creator who has, is, and ever creates new things. This time God is in the workshop creating a previously never existing earth and heavens. How does life change in this new creation or paradigm? No SIDS / no infant mortality / longevity / personal ownership of homes and lands / "joy" "happiness" / general enjoyment of life /dialogue between humanity and God is intimate / nature is changed.

A LONG-REACHING VISION – The vision of 65:17-25 may strike us as wishful thinking or as the prophet’s rhetorical excess. Yet when we consider the work of God in Christ, we see that this vision of Isaiah entails the actual project God has undertaken through the obedience of his Son . . .

God reclaimed creation. Jesus harrowed Hades and recovered all that had been lost before his new creation, starting with Adam and moving right through the line of prophets and holy women and men to his own time.

. . . Isaiah saw dimly and in shadows, not because his vision was unclear or his speech ambiguous, which it is not, but because the grandeur of what God accomplished in the Son put this vision in a new light. We are able to see into the gospel of Jesus with the aid of this vision, and in return, we see this vision as that final report of God’s ultimate purposes for the world.  [1]

connections

God promises to create new heavens and a new earth; so glorious will this new creation be that the past will no longer command our attention. What events in your life have been overwhelming goodness that nearly canceled out previous obstacles?

gambits

Parallel this lesson by pushing your imagination key—draw from cinema, literature, and other media to describe visions of a better day; explore the brokenness of the world—and church—before holding up the vision that has as its core, Jesus Christ as the purposeful action of Love let loose in the world of brokenness.

Can you recall a scene from J.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, etc. or C.S. Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles that envisions a future very different from our own? That may be a great way to begin a homily – by depicting an artist’s or writer’s conception of a very different world; such a vision could quite naturally lead from that into the new world of Isaiah 65.

An elderly man in one of the churches I pastored once invited me down into his basement. There, filling the entire room was an electric train set and a village built all around and along the tracks. Such was the vision he had of the perfect world without violence, smut, fast cars, pollution, or (in his case) young children. What would you build in your dream world?

How can this ancient passage speak to us in a new context? How can our sermon/homily be faithful to the text—to reproduce at least some of the rhetorical function of the text? How does Jesus Christ—our confession of his saving and reconciling action—change or alter the way we view this vision in Isaiah 65?

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[1] The New Interpreter’s Bible VI (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), page 551.