reflections in the first place and for the patient encouragement which has kept me to the task. I am grateful, too, to SPCK for accepting the project, and to Joanna Moriarty and Mary Matthews who have helped bring it to completion.
Tom Wright
The First Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 2.1–5
Romans 13.11–14
Matthew 24.36–44
With the lectionary’s new year comes St Matthew, with warnings about the days of Noah. Noah’s solitary gospel cameo; he doesn’t feature much in the epistles, either. Why not?
The point about Noah’s days is that they were ordinary. Eating, drinking, family life as usual; no signs, no hint of what is to happen. This contrasts with the previous verses, where detailed signs herald Jerusalem’s destruction; some suggest that this is a different ‘day and hour’, the second coming itself, which might occur at any time, not necessarily after a generation. Alternatively, these warnings too can be interpreted as relating to Jerusalem’s fall, but as referring narrowly to the specific moment of calamity.
From early days, however, Christians have read this text as referring to the ultimate future, the day for which even AD 70 was just a rehearsal, the day when some will be ‘taken’ (in judgement) and others ‘left’ (in mercy). If we wish to read the text this way, however, we must temper it with the emphasis of Paul: do not suppose that you are at the moment simply in darkness, with nothing to do before the great day arrives. The day has already begun to dawn with the coming of Jesus, so that Jesus’ followers are already people of the day. The promise – and warning – of God’s future is meant to inculcate neither helplessness nor complacency, but rather energy to work as day-people in a world that thinks it’s still night.
Paul has his own detailed agenda of what this will mean. No night-behaviour: many of the sins he lists in v. 13 may have been nocturnal in Rome, but his point is clearly metaphorical, since quarrelling and jealousy keep no special hours. Those who clothe themselves with the Lord of the day must renounce all such behaviour; sinful practices, particularly those of the flesh, will shriek that it’s unnatural to say ‘no’ to them, but once the day has dawned the shadows cannot dictate to the sunlight, nor the nightmares to the morning’s tasks.
For Paul, then, the great event for which Israel had longed had already arrived in Jesus. This means that prophecies like Isaiah 2 are already brought to birth in God’s reality. Paul saw his own mission to the Gentiles as the fulfilment of Isaiah’s promise: the nations were already coming in to God’s people, to hear the message of salvation that the creator God had entrusted to the Jews, and had fulfilled in the Jewish Messiah. Isaiah’s promise of universal peace must therefore be read, like Paul’s call to personal holiness, as our present agenda. We must neither look helplessly at a dark and sleeping world, nor think complacently that we, the church, are all right as we are. We must wake people up to the fact that the sun is already shining, and that the judge of the nations is at the door, longing to see his justice and peace enfold the world in a single embrace.
The Second Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 11.1–10
Romans 15.4– 13
Matthew 3.1– 12
‘His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord’ (Isaiah 11.3). Yes, no doubt, but the Hebrew word for ‘delight’ actually means ‘smell’. This may be just a metaphor, borrowed perhaps from the cultic contexts in which God delights in the pleasing odour of sacrifices, but the reason for taking it thus is our modern, Western downgrading of the sense of smell as the most accurate judge of situations and people. It may sound absurd to us, but to this day in several cultures there are people who stand at the doors of churches, and for that matter mosques, and refuse people admission on the grounds that they carry with them a scent of evil. Some animals, of course, can arrive at accurate judgements of people on similar grounds.
The point of this surprising comment in Isaiah is that the Messiah, when he comes, will judge with fine-honed accuracy. Eyes may deceive; ears may listen to powerful voices; but the Messiah’s justice will have a sense of smell, attuned by the fear of the Lord, through which wickedness will be identified and dealt with. Out of this sharp-edged judgement, cutting through the fuzzy half-truths with which so much of our human discourse is saturated, will come the time of peace, of harmony, of wolves lying down with lambs, of the earth being full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (And how do the waters cover the sea? They are the sea.)
The passage from Romans is a hangover from the old Bible Sunday readings (see 15.4 in particular), but it happily echoes Isaiah’s theme anyway. Paul swaps the prophet’s animals for humans: instead of wolves and lambs, Jews and Gentiles are brought together in harmony. All is based on the work of the Messiah, who has fulfilled the promises to Israel (v. 8) precisely in order that the whole world might now glorify God for his mercy. Despite the persistent idea that the gospel message to Gentiles had to be de-Judaized, Paul sees that what the world needs is precisely the Jewish message that the creator God is bringing his justice to bear on the world by fulfilling his promises to Israel. This is, of course, precisely what the previous fourteen chapters of Romans are about: the messianic work through which God’s justice/righteousness (I’m still waiting for offers of a word which carries both meanings) is brought to bear on all creation.
Isaiah again, this time in Matthew 3. The ‘voice’ was to prepare the way for YHWH to come, back through the desert from Babylon or wherever else he had hidden, back to Israel in justice and redemption. And there in the wilderness was John preparing the way for the Messiah who would come and separate the wheat from the chaff. The waters that would flood the world with the knowledge of the Lord must first sweep over Israel in cleansing and mercy.
The Third Sunday of Advent
Isaiah 35.1–10
James 5.7–10
Matthew 11.2–11
One of the recently edited Dead Sea Scrolls (no. 521 of the Cave 4 collection, if anyone out there wants the reference) contains a portrait of the coming Messiah that, like Matthew 11, looks back to Isaiah 35: ‘He will … free prisoners, giving sight to the blind, straightening out the twisted … and he will heal the wounded and make the dead live, he will proclaim good news to the meek, give to the needy, lead the exiled and enrich the hungry.’ These ideas were clearly ‘in the air’ at the time of Jesus: when the Messiah came, the lavish programme of healing and restoration outlined by Isaiah would be put into effect.
Nobody knows, of course, just how literally people took it. Scholars debate whether, for instance, the Qumran community expected the literal resurrection of the dead. But nor can anyone doubt that Jesus’ reply to John was about as clear a messianic claim as could be made without spelling it out explicitly inch by inch. (John had heard in prison, says v. 2, of ‘the deeds of the Messiah’, not ‘what Christ was doing’; making ‘Christ’ a proper name here neatly misses the point of the whole paragraph.)
But why would Jesus want to be reticent? The rest of the passage makes it clear: there was already a king of the Jews, and the house of Herod had a bad track record, to put it mildly, when it came to tolerating other would-be kings. John, from whom the question had come, was after