Advent is our annual engagement with hope and expectation.
We allow ourselves to ‘wait’.
What are we waiting for?
The usual answer is
Christmas…..
Advent is there because of Christmas,
but we aren’t really waiting for Christmas,
we are waiting for Christ.
This is a natural time to settle into the Old Testament,
and to hear it as a developing awareness of ‘waiting on God’.
We are encouraged to do this by the letter of James today,
who commends the example of the prophets for their ‘patience’,
as they wait.
So we should look closely at our reading from Isaiah,
with this in mind.
We approach it as what it is – a poem.
Hebrew poetry uses what is sometimes called ‘sense rhyme’,
building effect by lines of similar meaning.
Let the wilderness and the dry-lands exult,
let the wasteland rejoice and bloom,
let it bring forth flowers like the jonquil,
let it rejoice and sing for joy.
The poem starts with an image of the Southern Desert
– this was the land of enemies, the Edomites,
the southern part of Israel today–
an image of this desert flowering.
of life
breaking forth:
a spring-time in a place where this in inconceivable:
in a dry, arid desert.
Unsaid, but intended, is that Judah will possess this fertile land.
The glory of Lebanon is bestowed on it,
the splendour of Carmel and Sharon;
they shall see the glory of the Lord,
the splendour of our God.
This land will bloom in a way that matches area to the North,
in Lebanon,
and on the coast (Carmel and Sharon).
This is an outbreak of joy,
And in such a transformation,
the glory, the splendour, of God can be seen.
Strengthen all weary hands,
steady all trembling knees
and say to all faint hearts,
‘Courage! Do not be afraid.
‘Look, your God is coming,
vengeance is coming,
the retribution of God;
he is coming to save you.
These thoughts are to strengthen resolve,
to lift spirits
to increase confidence that God will act for his people.
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
the ears of the deaf unsealed,
then the lame shall leap like a deer
and the tongues of the dumb sing for joy.
It is not only the dessert that blossoms;
the people are healed:
And this is about more than physical healing,
it is about singing and dancing before the Lord.
Then, sadly,
the lectionary leaves out some verses
about plentiful water in the desert
and about a safe highway for the people,
a safe highway on which, returning to the lectionary,
They will come to Zion shouting for joy,
everlasting joy on their faces;
joy and gladness will go with them
and sorrow and lament be ended.
And here we have the climax, and key, to the poem.
It is prophetic confidence
that sorrow and lament will
through God’s action
be transformed
in God’s good time
to joy and gladness.
It is a poem of joyful hope about being saved.
The author of this poem
didn’t know how or when this transformation will occur.
He was writing a poem,
not a detailed prediction of the future.
He wanted to articulate that
God is fundamentally, decisively, for his people.
Isaiah contains numerous such poems: Isaiah is the prophet of Advent.
In the gospel we hear Jesus, talking about his ministry, saying
tell John what you hear and see;
the blind see again, and the lame walk,
lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear,
and the dead are raised to life
and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor
There are allusions here to several different passages in Isaiah,
including the one we have just looked at.
The line
and the Good News is proclaimed to the poor
points to another well-known passage,
from later in Isaiah (Ch 61),
The Spirit of the Lord has been given to me,
for the Lord has anointed me,
he has sent me to give the good news to the poor,
to bind up hearts that are broken
to proclaim liberty to captives
…and so on
We miss the main point if we think the gospel is simply picking up these odd lines from Isaiah as predictions of the future.
No
what is being said is that the whole poem,
which was our first reading,
and others like it,
finds its deepest meaning through the person of Jesus:
he is its living fulfilment,
he is salvation personified.
Finally, Jesus finishes by saying
and happy is the man who does not lose faith in me
which can also be translated as
and happy is the man who is not offended by me
Now,
it wasn’t obvious at the time that Jesus was the fulfilment of all the hopes built up through the Old Testament.
He wasn’t really at all what was expected,
And, as far as I know,
the desert is still a desert:
and Judea remained beleaguered:
those who took the prophecies very literally,
who didn’t see the truth beneath the surface,
were offended by the idea that they are fulfilled in Jesus.
Unlike the prophets,
we live in the time
after God’s definitive self-disclosure in Jesus,
but
we also have much in common with them:
we wait, and pray, and hope for all that is promised through Jesus.
At every Mass, straight after the Our Father,
The priest prays
that we be delivered from evil,
granted peace,
freed from sin,
protected from anxiety
as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Let us make that part of this Mass an Advent moment today.