11 th December: 3 rd Sunday of Advent

Redemptive Reversals

In this season of Advent, we wait, once more, upon the promise. Expectantly, and in hope, we wait for a new future promised unto us throughout the scriptures, the promise—which our texts this morning can describe only through metaphor—of genuine new conditions breaking into a world that, with each passing day, provides more evidence of its unredeemed state. We wait, liturgically during Advent, in a tensive in-between. Between a world that remains unredeemed and the promise of a redeemed future scarcely recognizable—indeed, scarcely believable—from the present vantage point. Veni, veni, Emmanuel.

Our verses today from Isaiah were likely penned by Second Isaiah, who wrote for a community defeated by war, enslaved by oppressors, and uprooted from their homeland grounded in community and covenant. This biblical picture of desolation, dislocation, and isolation gives the contemporary reader reason to pause and to develop new eyes to see the plight of the many refugees and forced migrants today, many of whom toil and wait and hope in the precise region from which the words of Second Isaiah now reach us: Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. As if against the background of a desolate dessert remembered in the Exodus from Egypt and once more in Babylonian captivity, Second Isaiah writes of the promise as a future but encroaching reality, ‘The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the dessert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing.’ (Is. 35:1). Dry land and wilderness juxtaposed with experiences of gladness, rejoicing, singing, and with an environmental metaphor of verdant growth signaling a natural world that shares in the glory of redemption.

Could this be mere aspiration? The promise sounds so contrapuntal to the experience at hand, both for the ancient audience of Second Isaiah and our own contemporary communities. Second Isaiah heralds great imperatives to the community: ‘Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”’ (Is. 35:4). This passage links the promise of God with the agency and freedom of God’s people to contribute to the new reign of God. Against a blighted experience that would suggest otherwise, the prophet writes joyfully of what Stacey Simpson Duke calls ‘redemptive reversals’, which will be ‘dramatic and complete’. ⁶

What are the redemptive reversals we ourselves hope for in Advent? Do we even know? Chances are, they are many, not easily mentioned and catalogued, sometimes not even perceived, as human experience is so diversely situated and personal lives so utterly unique and ever-changing, as well as broken. Yet hope’s target in Second Isaiah may hold for us as well: if the prophet writes of God’s promise that the eyes of the blind shall be opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped, the lame will leap like deer, and the voices of the speechless will sing for joy (Is. 35:5–6), the coming of God and the promise it brings produces in us a sure hope for the healing that renders us whole. While particular examples of hurt and healing may be as diverse now as they were then, the desire to be made whole remains the same, to be healed and redeemed from all that threatens us as creatures of God and from all that separates us from each other as members of one body, brothers and sisters.

In the season of Advent, the waiting for the coming of God and of God’s promise may require us first to acquaint more deeply with the powers and principalities that threaten, that tear down and dis-integrate, so as both to perceive the work of God that heals and makes us whole as well as our own behaviors that lend assent to God’s redemptive reversals. More than physical disabilities, the text invites us to consider in what our own and various forms of spiritual blindness, deafness, and the like may consist, however able we may otherwise appear to be. How do we fail to see that which threatens ourselves and others? Why do we not hear the cry of those whose voices have fallen into dis-integration, far from the wholeness longed for? In these ways, too, we may stand in need of the redemptive reversals about which Second Isaiah writes. Perhaps with some humor and a personal sigh of recognition, the author notes that not even ‘fools’ will go astray from this new highway built in the wilderness. Thankfully, the divine will to redeem and save is immutable, whereas our own desire to be available and accept the promise often reads as a different story.

For Matthew 11, the redemptive reversals from Isaiah come in the person of Jesus, the ‘Messiah’ (Mt. 11:2). To John the Baptist’s question of Jesus, which John sent from a place of imprisonment, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ Jesus responds to John’s disciples, ‘Go and tell John what you hear and see, the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.’ (Mt. 11:3–5). These metaphors for redemptive reversals appearing in both books and testaments must be pondered and contemplated. Tellingly, Jesus begins to speak once more, and as he does so the crowd turned their backs to him and ‘went away’ (Mt. 11:7). Like Isaiah’s ‘fool’, who nonetheless held space on the redemptive highway, and like the crowd before Jesus who ‘went away’ as Jesus preached (Is. 11:8; Mt. 11:7), we must ask where and how we too act foolishly, turning our backs on the work of God to make us whole. As this work is pro nobis et nostram salutem, in turning away from the one who turns toward but never away from us, we turn away from ourselves and become active agents in our own dis-integration. Perhaps even like John the Baptist, among whom Jesus says there are none greater born of women, we too may wonder if Jesus’ promise is really all that its chalked up to be or, indeed, if Jesus is the one to deliver it. We may wonder if redemptive reversals are simply the product of literary aspiration, penned by a broken prophet for a people with no legitimate reason to hope. Are the biblical metaphors too much for us? The blind seeing, the deaf hearing, the lame leading, the dead living? Are we, like John, posing questions and registering skepticism from our own private, unique places of imprisonment?

That the cross is the final destination of he who is coming into the world bearing the promise for all may give us pause to consider how those before us likewise, across a social and political spectrum, questioned Jesus and turned their backs to him and went away. This may be why Karl Barth affirmed the Word of God as genuinely other, as something profoundly new breaking into the world which of necessity creates its own conditions for reception in faith. As the promise reaches into our lives with all of its spectacular redemptive reversals, we must render ourselves open to it, be becoming open to the Spirit’s opening of our hearts. As Jesus says of John to the departing crowd, redemptive reversals will come not in “soft robes or royal palaces” (Mt. 11:8 )—in forms and persons presenting as spectacular or gaudy by conventional understanding—but instead, like John, in spectacular simplicity and even austerity, in forms scarcely recognizable by conventional understanding, even where there is doubt. This pervasive lack of recognition comments more on us than it does on the message, and presents us once more with our need of it. And so, we wait. We prepare. Veni, veni, Emmanuel.