The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
December 7, 2008
Vol. 11 no. 48

Everything But...
           Straight, flat roads don’t bother us here. All the better to see how far you have to go. I have heard war stories from Saskatchewan natives who drove the Pennsylvania Turnpike and found that they were so exhausted by the perpetual twists and turns, uphills and downhills of the Turnpike that they required two days of driving a distance that would have taken only half a day on the prairies. “Make straight in the desert a highway for our God,” Isaiah proclaims, and for that matter for God’s people out here.
           What we know about highways in antiquity show that the Israelites probably cheated by our standards. The royal highway, usually meant for an arriving or visiting king, would stretch out for a mile or two only outside the capital city - a sort of ceremonial red carpet rather than a true means of transportation. Not that road building is easy in any locale and generation, but these royal highways were easier to keep straight for a short stretch.
           Isaiah uses the metaphor of a straight road to point to something more crooked. The wilderness placed its emphasis upon wild and unmanageable. That a straight highway could be carved out of the wilderness describes the paradox the grace of God taking this messed-up twisted human life and repaving it into something beautiful.
           The Biblical world had a deep respect for the wilderness - the bush or the sticks. It is a land not intended for human beings as only ferocious animals and God dwell there, a logical place for prophets and saints, people possessed by God. When John the Baptist appears unpredictably, the Gospel really begins. God, after all, has a habit of being unpredictable and just a little bit wild.