The vision of Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom: it is an
incredible park, beautiful, breathtaking. A Garden of Eden. Reminds me of the beginning of
Jurassic Park—another Garden of Eden, another peaceable kingdom where huge animals
seem docile and gentle. Yet the garden turns in on itself and becomes a living hell, a
feeding ground of beasts; a scene right out of the apocalypse of John—especially when
the power goes off in the Park and the saw-tooth, shrewd raptors escape. You might want to
hold up "parks" in tension—the fun and entertaining Disneyland types over
against other kinds of playgrounds
The following is a powerful image, dark and foreboding of a vision within evil fences:
"When I was six years old I played on the most marvelous playground. As I remember
it now, it was all mine, though certainly other children must have been around to play on
it. I still see it through my six-year-old eyes, and it stretches out forever behind our
two-story house in Frankfurt, Germany . . .
I remember it as a place filled with wonderful things. I climbed up and over broken
brick walls, and I was a cowboy standing on a mountain. I scaled enormous slabs of
concrete that slanted up out of the ground and found a dozen secret places that only I
knew about. Raspberries grew on my playground, and gooseberries, and red currants: I
picked them right off the vine and ate them and stained my shirt with them. In a shoe box
I collected little scraps of melted glass that littered the earth. You could find all
sorts of things on my playground.
One day I was digging in my playground and uncovered a little blue rubber motorcycle. I
scraped the dirt away. The wheels still rolled. The little blue motorcycle could have been
mine. I knew it wasn’t. It belonged to someone else, to another little boy. It
belonged to whoever had played on my playground before me.
I wondered what had happened to that little boy, and as I wondered, a fact I had known,
assumed, and taken for granted slipped from the surface of my knowing into the very depts.
Of my awareness. What I had dug up that day was not only a little blue motorcycle, but an
awareness of the presence of evil in the world. My world." [1]
"What is the Kingdom of God [like]? It is a public park! It is a park where old
people are no longer cold and lonely and ill and senile, but participants in a community.
It is a public park where the elderly can sit together and bask in the sun, and talk and
laugh over the good old days in full vigor and clear mind and satisfaction of life.
The kingdom of God is a public park where little children can run and play in its
squares, in safety and fun and delight. . . . it is a place where no child is abused or
unwanted or malnourished, and where there is not even a bully among the group, shoving and
taunting the littler ones until they break into tears. The Kingdom of God . . . is a
public park where the streets are safe for children." [2]
