Reimagining the Lion and the Lamb

Dear Friends,

This week, enjoy these imaginative pairings of God’s creation in Isaiah 11.6-9: 

“Then the wolf shall be the guest of the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.

The calf and young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them.
The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like an ox.
The baby shall play by the cobra’s den, and the child lay his hand on the adder’s lair.
There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain for the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.”

To our way of thinking, these pairings don’t fit together. They seem adversarial. They don’t make sense. Have you ever seen a lion eat hay? Yet combinations of these images appear on Christmas cards, so our ancestors in the faith made what they believed were significant connections. In the Book of Revelations, Chapter 5, Jesus is called the Lion of Judah. He is in continuity with the sacrificial lamb, Jesus, who died for us. Jesus is both lion and lamb.

But for us today, caught as we are in the throes of a pandemic, squashed in by political battles and economic hardship, we might want to think about these figures – the lion and the lamb in the more non-biblical way – as daring to thwart one another’s lives.

We could call by the name “lion” those destructive ways of being that stalk the lambs of our society and world, causing fear, anxiety, and death. The pandemic is a lion, and the lamb the fragile human bodies don’t stand a chance against it. The lion is the emotional stress we find in us that makes us attack others, even if at other times, we love them. Abuse. Physical abuse, mental abuse. They are part of our world today. The lion is that part of us that gives no peace to our alter ego – that part of us that wants wholeness and peace prevail. In this way of thinking, the lion and the lamb are, indeed, adversarial.

What can we be, become, and/or do during this Advent season in order to reclaim the biblical imagery of the lion and lamb being one – to relinquish the adversarial way we experience them in this dismal time?

Allow for daily silence. Even a few minutes away from others, the TV or the internet. Let the hidden gifts of this season seep into our consciousness. Silence contentiousness. Welcome inner quiet. Turn away from noise. Meet God in the deep silence of your heart.

Close the door to violence. We see it nightly on television. Brawls and batterings. We need not support violence, buy it, nor give it a place in our homes. Embrace peace and let it show up in daily living.

God is coming, the one who is both lion and lamb. Will we recognize him?

~ Sister Joan Sobala