Advent Reflection 1: Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 13:11-14

My reflections have been interrupted by the AAR meeting and time away -- I plan to post the paper I read at the conference (on Agamben's messianism), but I may be reading a version of the same paper at another conference, in which case I will hold off a little longer. In the meantime, Advent...

Isaiah 2:1-5
2:1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2:2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.
2:3 Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
2:4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
2:5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

Romans 13:11-14
13:11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;
13:12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;
13:13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
13:14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Comment:
I want to read these texts together. Firstly, because they arrive together in the lectionary – not without someone else’s interpretive decision, of course; but also, because I don’t know what to do with the Isaiah text. I don’t know how to read today, as sacred, as normative, a text which celebrates a particularity, a place with such geo-graphical, -political, -theological significance and antagonism. My intuition is that the place of which this text speaks needs to be read in light of the time of which it speaks.

The text from Isaiah speaks of both place and time, but first of all of place. It is here to which the nations will stream, not for the establishment of a statist project, not out of a desire to force the coming of the kingdom by way of some prophetic blueprint (and thereby becoming what Rosenzweig calls a “tyrant of the Kingdom”), but for a justice that exceeds these orders; not to perform military service or to build “fences,” but to unlearn war.

The time of which the passage speaks is a time of the future, in “days to come.” That is, not now. The time is not ripe for such a place. I want to read Paul’s text along with this one, not because of a tacit superscessionism, but because, in Romans we get an intensification of the temporal dimension, and an effacement of the spatial. The time is no longer merely to-come, as salvation is, but it is now that the text summons us to. Not because the time has arrived for learning justice and unlearning war, but because we need to work, to wake in order to make it so. There is not promise so much as exigency, but it is also promise –; exigency without promise is messianic tyranny; promise without exigency is the neutralization of the messianic.