How in all these years of being a student of the Bible I could have been so wrong about some of its most important themes, I do not know. Well before I could talk, my parents and grandparents started with me. Noah this. Moses that. This little piggy mixed with thus saith the Lord. I never really strayed from that path. Still, I have been wrong. Wrong about Isaiah 43:19 (Behold I do a new thing … do you not perceive it?) and 2 Corinthians 5:17 (Whoever is in Christ is a new creation). About old wineskins (Luke 5:36), the way the world moves forward (John 3:1-16) and what God thinks about change and the future, transition and disruption. I can hardly imagine how I could have been so wrong. Except of course, I can and so can you.
It turns out that not only is there is no such thing as an unbiased reading of the Scripture text, but few of us are unbiased about change either. In my faith community we had a passion for conserving the past. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, we said.
The mindset did not exactly equip us to see the whole picture. The Bible is nothing if not a kaleidoscope of change stories. Opening the pages of the book is like stepping into class five rapids. Kings come and go from the stage, chariots fall into the sea, nations rise, falter and are hauled off into captivity. Tribes are lost, the prophet’s words carried off in the wind, whole civilizations swept away. Surely the people are grass.
Change stories are not always easy to hear. Isaiah’s famous words on the subject of change start with “comfort” for a reason. Ancient Israel thought they knew the immortal, invisible, immutable God who could be counted on to protect them, but that was before they woke up in Babylon. In chapter 40, Isaiah is not only writing great lyrics for an 18th century composer to come along some day and scoop up, he is painting a shadow into Israel’s view of God. “A voice says, Cry. And I say, What shall I cry? All people are grass and their constancy is like the flower of the field.” The way Isaiah places the darker colors of doubt or resistance or even passive-aggressive pique is interesting — he puts them in the middle of the passage (verses 6-8) and bookends them with tidings of comfort (verses 3-6) and joy (verses 9-11).
It is, perhaps, his way of saying that times of transition can be generative times – times where the work that God is doing seems to sweep you up and grow in your very hands the way it did in Isaiah’s – in spite of the doubts or discouragement. That ultimately even doubt (or resistance or discouragement) can become part of the process. Part of the transition. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase some spirituality teachers use: “transcend and include.” Good transitions like Isaiah’s do that.
A good transition calls forth creativity from us in ways that other things do not. God has a way of using change to open us to complexities we might not otherwise have seen, to tenderness we might not otherwise have known and to a future we might otherwise have feared. Yes, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. But he is not static. He is on the move. And he is leading us into the new creation. Through both the Sweet Bye and Bye and what the preacher J. Alfred Smith Sr. calls the Nasty Now and Now, we are swept up and swept forward. Doubts and all.
JANA CHILDERS is dean and vice president for academic affairs at San Francisco Theological Seminary.
