The Hopes and Fears of All the Years: Day Five

Don't Confuse What Feels Like an End with the End

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”
— Semisonic, Closing Time

Text: Isaiah 11:1-9

I’ll never forget my first day of New Testament in seminary. My assumption was that we’d begin with Paul’s authentic letters, since they are the earliest documents within the New Testament, or possibly Matthew, since it’s the first book in the canonical order. My professor walked in and, to my surprise, did neither. Instead, he read to us from 2 Kings 25, which details the collapse of the Davidic monarchy and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. These verses stood out in particular as he read:

Then they captured the king and brought him up to the king of Babylon at Riblah, who passed sentence on him. They slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes, then put out the eyes of Zedekiah; they bound him in fetters and took him to Babylon. - 2 Kings 25:6-7, NRSVue

What in the world did this have to do with Jesus or the New Testament? As it turns out, it has everything to do with Jesus and the New Testament. The Davidic Covenant—the promise that God made to David that he would always have a descendent on the throne of Israel—loomed large for Judah. Here in 2 Kings 25, that promise to David is placed into peril. It’s a gruesome scene. The king of Judah has been captured by the Babylonians, and the last thing he sees before his eyes are gouged out is the killing of his sons. This is devastating for a father, and yet the impact is not just familial. The rightful Davidic heirs have been killed. The final act witnessed by Zedekiah was the crushing reality that God’s eternal promise to David was coming to an end.

That’s why so many texts written around this time began to speak to a longing for that promise to be revived. A Davidic ancestor on the throne meant that the exiled community had come home, that they were back in the land. It would also signify that they were BACK, living freely and ruled by one of their own, not a foreign power. So, you can imagine how this tension—being home, but still feeling like the exile was somehow still happening—began to stir the hopes and imagination of the Prophets.

Isaiah gives us a powerful image, that of a tree stump that represents Jesse, David’s father. While the powerful cedar that had once grown there no longer stood, new life was possible.

A small shoot was beginning to grow.

It’s such a tender, even fragile image—a stump and a shoot. Nothing majestic or impressive. Nothing that screams “empire” or “an unstoppable dynasty.” Just a leftover stump, a small sign that what will be might look quite different from what came before, but something new is happening.

This is how the prophetic tradition begins to reimagine God’s promise: not just a return to the old glory days, but the surprising, subversive work of new life sprouting out of loss and defeat. It’s as if Isaiah is saying, “Yes, the tree has fallen. Yes, the exile happened. We’re still carrying that trauma in our collective bones, but don’t confuse what feels like an end with the end.”

This is the soil out of which the New Testament grows.
Not triumph.
Not certainty.
Not a neatly packaged airtight theological system.
But longing, disappointment, and the stubborn conviction that God can somehow cultivate hope, even out of dead stumps.

By the time we get to Jesus, generations have lived with this ache.

When the Gospel writers introduce Jesus they start with genealogies. They situate the story of Jesus within that old, distant promise, as if to say, “Remember that shoot? Remember that fragile hope you thought had died with Babylon or Persia or Greece or Rome? Look closer. It’s growing!”

This is what I love about the Jesus story, especially when read through this lens of exile and restoration:
Jesus doesn’t come to prop up the old system; He comes to transform it.
Jesus doesn’t pursue empire; He offers a radically different alternative to it.
Jesus doesn’t raise up an army; He lifts up the oppressed and marginalized.
Jesus doesn’t wound or exclude; He offers healing and inclusion.

The New Testament begins with a people who live out of the memory of great loss. They still bear the scars of exile, all these years later. It also begins with a stump, a shoot, and an abiding hope that refuses to stay buried.

Maybe that’s still the invitation for us:
To name the stumps in our own lives—the endings, the disappointments, the dreams that didn’t survive.

AND

To trust that new and unexpected life can still break through even when that seems unlikely and impossible.

Reflection:
Where do you see even the smallest signs of hope and life around you?