Stumps, Roots, and Branches

Reflections on the Lectionary for the Second Sunday of Advent

What’s in a root? What does a shoot mean, and what is signified in a stump?

It’s always worth asking what work our metaphors are doing for us. The lectionary for the second week of Advent is full of arboreal metaphors—it’s a very tree-heavy set of passages. The passage from Isaiah 11 begins with “the stump of Jesse” out of which a shoot shall come, and claims that a branch will come from its roots. The passage from Romans 15 quotes that Isaiah passage, as part of Paul’s attempt to justify his mission to gentiles. In the selection from Matthew 3, John the Baptist proclaims (threatens?) that “even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And just so that the trees don’t get all the vegetative glory, the passage from Psalm 72 mentions grass, and the ways the king nourishes the people like rain on mown grass.

Metaphors are handy ways to convey meaning, but they can also be dangerous. While we might use a metaphor for its positive associations, there can always be other, more destructive associations that come alongside or after it. For instance, if we describe a family gathering as “a circus,” we might mean to say that was non-stop fun and full of wild adventures. But the word “circus” also smuggles in a lot of bad associations too, of shallowness, an out-of-control atmosphere, and needless frivolity. We might not mean those things when we say it was “a circus,” but they are part of the metaphor anyway.

The tree metaphors in Isaiah and Matthew, and Paul’s citation of the Isaiah text, have the same problem. They’re describing Israel and its associated families, polities, and cultures as a tree, which on the surface might seem like a complimentary thing to say. Trees are strong, useful, beautiful, and enduring. But the metaphor here is not all positive, as the tree is already a stump in Isaiah’s telling, and John the Baptist proposes to chop it down. Isaiah means this as a hopeful thing—that the tree that had been chopped down and dead might bring forth new life. In the context of Isaiah’s day, this is a really great hope. But in the hands of later interpreters from Paul forward, the metaphor of new life coming from an old rootstock took on different meanings. When Christians began to read Isaiah and interpret it, many of them understood it to refer not to the renewal of Israel, but to something new coming out of the death and destruction of Israel. They came up with a reading of this that was supersessionist.

Supersessionism is the pattern of thought and interpretation by which Christians argue that Jesus and Christianity supersede or surpass Israel and Judaism. Supersessionism is at work when Christians talk about the “God of the Old Testament” as vengeful and bloodthirsty and the “God of the New Testament” as loving and gracious. Christians spread supersessionism when they talk about themselves as the “true Israel” or as the “children of Abraham” (something else that’s in that Matthew passage). It’s a lazy and wrong way of describing Christianity’s relationship with the legacy of Israel, and it has fueled a lot of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism over the years, both intentional and not. The truth is, Israel and Judaism are alive and well, and they have neither been chopped down or surpassed. Christianity draws on that legacy, but it does not replace or supersede Israel or Judaism in any way. It’s dangerous and wrong to suggest that it does.

How then should we read passages like the ones in Isaiah and Matthew? It’s tricky. The Isaiah passage is here in the lectionary this week precisely because the “shoot…from the stump of Jesse” and the “branch…out of his roots” has been understood as Jesus. Christians read much of Isaiah (and other prophets too) as pointing to Jesus. This passage is a good example, but it’s far from the only one. Advent is full of these kinds of readings. They all assume that Isaiah, writing centuries before Jesus, was pointing to Jesus as the fulfillment of the prophetic promise. (The Gospel of Matthew is particularly explicit about this kind of fulfillment). So, the first step to not being supersessionist, in my opinion, is simply to acknowledge at every step that the Christian use of Isaiah and other prophetic texts is just that—a use of them. Isaiah does not point inevitably to Jesus, and in fact a lot of Isaiah doesn’t make sense for thinking about Jesus at all. There are many possible meanings of Isaiah, of which Jesus is one, but there is nothing definitive, encompassing, or final about Jesus that forecloses other ways of reading Isaiah. Jesus was, for some Jews (but not others), one way of understanding the promises of passages like this one as being fulfilled. But many, many other understandings can stand alongside it. When Christians proclaim Jesus as a “shoot…out from the stump of Jesse,” we should always remember that there are many other shoots, and many other branches, and that it’s not our tree anyway. We can’t claim a monopoly on the power of that metaphor, and we can’t claim the tree either.

So too with the Matthew passage. Passages about John the Baptist function both in the gospels and in the lectionary as a way to lay groundwork for Jesus. They try to demonstrate continuity between a certain form of Judaism that was expecting a messianic figure and a messianic age, and Jesus as a natural outcome of that expectation. John’s presence in the New Testament is always a little bit awkward, like the text doesn’t quite know what to do with him, probably because historically John and Jesus might have been frenemies (friends who were also competitors in a certain sense). They were rivals on some level, and so the New Testament usually depicts John as powerful and wise but also secondary and preliminary. He’s always pointing onward to Jesus, even in the scenes when they directly interact, and this passage is no different. In 3:11 and 3:12, John is suggesting just this—that John’s baptism is a placeholder for something more to come. The “ax is lying at the root of the trees” language in Matthew 3:10 is a way for the text to simultaneously affirm Israel’s expectation for something new and position John and Jesus as outcomes of that expectation. Christians over-interpret this as a destruction of Israel, or at least a surpassing of it, when it’s better understood as a form of the kind of prophetic hope that Isaiah was expressing.

Advent is always going to be a risky time for Christians, because it’s a season in which the trajectory of Israelite history is at front and center, and a time when Christians make very explicit and strong claims about Jesus as the fulfillment of that trajectory. The metaphors of stumps, roots, and branches make that harder, not easier. People who are making proclamations during Advent need to be careful to not erase or minimize Israel, and to resist places in the New Testament that can be read that way. There is a way for Christians to be forthright about Jesus as an expression of how “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight,” as the carol goes, while also being clear that not everyone sees it that way, and that when we make those claims we run the risk of usurping a history that isn’t ours. We can be Christian without being supersessionists, and now more than ever, it’s important to get that part right.