Second Sunday of Advent, 3 December 2022: Isaiah 11:1-10; Romans 15:4-13; Matthew 3:1-12; Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
All our readings today look to the future, a future of both goodness and change. In Isaiah, we hear of the future time when the spirit of the Lord will rest on the ruler, and “with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth”. The unnamed ruler will not just rule with justice; “with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked”. After that, peace will extend to the natural world: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid”. In this future, Isaiah tells us, “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord”.
The Psalmist shares a vision with Isaiah, but offers it as a prayer rather than a prophecy. “Give the King your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the King’s Son; that he may rule your people righteously and the poor with justice”. When this happens, people will share in prosperity, and the oppressor will be crushed. And “there shall be abundance of peace till the moon shall be no more”.
According to Paul, “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction”, to give us hope. Paul turns to the words of Isaiah and other quotations from the Hebrew scriptures. All of them point to a God of Hope. He closes with the words we often use as benediction at Evening Prayer: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Hope is not blind optimism. It is a vision of what could be. And getting there will not be simple. When John the Baptist appears, he announced that “the Kingdom of Heaven has come near”. He promises that the one who comes after him will baptize with “the Holy Spirit and fire”. Like Isaiah, John tells us that to get to the end, there will be destruction: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will . . . gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
Paul knows that the winnowing that John promised has not yet come to pass: it is still in the future. He asks the Romans to live “in harmony with one another”, to glorify God. And, he asks them to “welcome one another, just as Christ has welcomed you”. Paul asks us to live with eachother as if we are in the world that Isaiah prophesied. The God of Hope, Paul suggests, is visible in our attempts to create a model of the world to come. It may not be in the world around us, but it can be visible in small worlds.
It can be hard to hold on to hope in the world today. We live in a world which appears to be defined by scarcity (real or artificial), not abundance. There are wars, and people flee them. Climate change has brought more extreme weather: there are droughts and famines, but also flooding caused by more intense hurricanes and monsoons. The richest people in the world live an unsustainable lifestyle with mega-yachts, private jets, and trips to space, while an increasing number of the rest live one crisis away from disaster. It is hard to believe that we can get to the other side of this without significant suffering; we hope, like the psalmist, that the poor will be rescued and the oppressors crushed.
What do we do? Hope for Paul is not just a thought, but an action: harmony, welcome. We welcome those who wish to live into this world of abundance, because when you live in abundance, you can live in harmony. Such actions are not confined to church: they need to define our approach to the world. We need to know who the oppressors and oppressed are, so that we can work against the oppressors and support the oppressed.
Hope is not just assuming everything will be rainbows and puppies at some point in the future. It is living it into existence, in all parts of our lives.