Isaiah 11:1-10

Sometimes the prophets, including Isaiah, attribute the words that they offer to God, allowing God to speak through them. That’s not the case with today’s reading. This is visionary writing. Isaiah’s vision is a vision of hope – and hope is one of the themes of Advent – and it is also as a vision of judgement – and that is another important Advent theme. Judgement and hope don’t, on the face of it, seem to go together. We don’t instinctively hope to be judged. Yet Isaiah’s message is a message of hope. For what sort of people is the prospect of judgement a source of hope? For those who have been denied justice. Without judgement, there can be no justice and the human yearning for justice is very strong, though it is often darkened and diminished by the human desire for retribution and revenge.

Isaiah writes of a future ruler, a descendant of King David, that:

“…His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.”

Not fear in the sense of cringing terror, but rather awe and reverence for the God who is the source of all life and consciousness.

Romans 15:4-13

In this passage from his letter to the Romans, St Paul picks up Isaiah’s phrase about “the root of Jesse”. Over the centuries that separated Paul from Isaiah, the Jewish people had experienced several foreign conquests, and had come to believe that Isaiah’s vision was of the coming of the Messiah, who would restore their independence. Paul is expressing the belief that Jesus is the Messiah, and that his coming is good news for everyone, for Jews such as himself and for Gentiles. The Christian congregation in Rome to whom he was writing almost certainly included both Jewish and Gentile converts, and his words imply that there were tensions and disagreements between them. He reminds them of the importance of unity:

“May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus.”

And the words with which today’s Epistle end echo the vision of the peaceable kingdom in our reading from Isaiah:

“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.”

Reflection

I know that some of you share my interest in family history. We enjoy discovering new facts about the people from whom we are descended. It is, among other things, a way of learning a little more about who we are. Both my mother’s and my father’s families were Methodists, going back several generations, and my most interesting discovery in recent years has been that one of my ancestors was baptized by John Wesley. A lovely detail to find on the family tree, though it doesn’t make me a better person.

Today’s Gospel reminds us that it isn’t our ancestry on which we will be judged, but rather our character and our behaviour. When the Pharisees and the Sadducees come to him to be baptized, John the Baptist turns on them and calls them a “brood of vipers”. You lot, he is saying, are descended from snakes. Right at the heart of his criticism of them is that they take pride in their ancestry, but they fail to live up to it. He tells them:

“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’”

And his point is clear – they may boast about being biological descendants of Abraham, but they don’t have Abraham’s faith and they don’t have Abraham’s virtues. They are not bearing good fruit, and John warns them that trees that do not bear good fruit get cut down.

That metaphor - the cutting down of trees – is also used by the Prophet Isaiah in today’s Old Testament reading.

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”

In this case the family tree that has been cut down is that of the Jewish royal family - the descendants of King David who was the youngest son of Jesse. That family tree was cut down because its members became corrupt. Foreign conquerors prevailed over them. Yet the prophet tells them that tree is not quite dead – out of its stump a new branch will grow, and a new and very different kind of ruler will come.

Isaiah’s prophecy speaks of human potential fully realized and the peaceable kingdom that makes possible. The faith of Abraham and the courage and creativity of King David show much of the potential that is in all human beings, regardless of whether they are biological descendants of Abraham and David or not. At the heart of the Jewish understanding of what it is to be human – and therefore at the heart of Jesus’ understanding of what it is to be human – is the insight that we humans are created in the image and likeness of God. That is what Isaiah is saying when he mixes his metaphors in the very first verse of today’s Old Testament reading:

“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.” 

Shoots do grow out of tree stumps, but branches do not grow out of roots, at least not directly. The roots of Jesse lay not only in his human ancestry, traceable back to Abraham, but in the God in whose image and likeness he was made, and we are all made.

The hope of Advent is that justice and peace are possible if we human beings define ourselves in terms of our shared rootedness in God. That is the only family tree that matters, because that is the only family tree that includes us all. It is the family tree that Jesus acknowledged by showing unconditional and unselective love to all who needed it and were able to receive it. We shall be judged, lovingly and fully, on the extent to which we have followed his example. Following that example is our only hope, but it is a very real hope.