Readings for the Third Sunday in Advent
Psalm 126
Isaiah 65:17-25
1 Thessalonians 5:12-18
John 1:6-8, 19-28
I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice in what I am creating…
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be the dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the LORD.
When you envision the afterlife, what do you imagine? There was a time when Christians typically imagined a dis-embodied reality where we lived in heaven and sort of just existed without trouble. Certainly, we would see our loved ones, but we would move quickly from their greeting us as we arrived into a state of worship which never ended. It was a quasi-Hellenistic (Greek) idea of being separated from the body and the earth to enjoy a spiritual existence that wasn’t encumbered or disturbed by the material. Yet, this vision of eternity has no roots in Scripture’s conception of the “afterlife.”
Because of the work by people like N.T. Wright1 and others,2 the idea that we don’t just “go to heaven when we die,” is becoming ubiquitous. Scripture doesn’t envision a “heavenly” existence for God’s people, at least not if by that we mean an eternal existence in heaven instead of on earth. Rather, it envisions a life here on earth that is heavenly, meaning a life on earth of harmony and peace. This, it turns out, might actually be harder to imagine or believe in than a disembodied life. Imagining a real, human, embodied life on the earth where there are no enemies, there is no war, and where people actually get along is Scripture’s visions. Through it, God promises us a life where things don’t go wrong, where our loved ones don’t die and things work out the way they’re supposed to. This is, admittedly, hard to believe.
We can imagine a disembodied life of no eating or drinking, without work and floating in heaven as if it were a kind of cosmic sensory depravation bath because if nothing happens, nothing can go wrong. But throw back into the picture living in a home with your family, where your neighbors have lives of there own, where other people are making their own decisions and suddenly, Scripture’s vision of the age to come is not so easy to grapple with. The only life we know is a life of discord and deteriorating bodies. We do not know a life where the wolf will not hunt and kill the lamb when she lies down.
Children of God
Biblical speech about the return of Jesus is filled with hyperbole, but its purpose isn’t meant to be exaggerative or fantasy. People will often read the hyperbole and think the text is either meant to be taken symbolically or its meant to be taken literally. In my opinion, both of these interpretations are category errors. Instead, the hyperbole is meant to stretch our imaginations beyond what we think we believe can be possible. What is possible in the age to come that is not possible here and now? Peace. A governing shalom that puts all things, not merely in order, but in harmony.3 There is, as it were, an absence of war and this is important to this prophecy—
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat…
This is a reference to the power of a foreign army who comes in, conquers, then occupies the land, taking the homes and resources of the people who live there. Yet the mention of war’s absence is only a single part of this picture of harmony. The end of the passage ends with the prophecy of the wolf and the lamb. If the absence of war were the only thing in view here, it would be enough to say that the wolf would not hunt the lamb any longer, or that the lamb would no longer hide from the wolf. That would be peace. But when the wolf no longer lusts after the lamb’s flesh, when the lamb no longer fears the wolf’s teeth, when the wolf and the lamb can stand side by side, eating the same grass, that is more than peace. That is shalom.
The wolf and lamb will quite literally eat grass together, and that will be a symbol of the shalom that reigns in God’s good kingdom.
Advent reminds us that this is not actually as good as it gets. Sometimes, life is good, and we express our gratitude to God for that, but often life is difficult at best. Sometimes, life is hard. Sometimes, life is terrible. Through the darkness of Advent, as the nights grow to the longest they will be, we remember that Jesus promised us the rebirth of the sun. We will rise from the dead with Jesus into a world of harmony and shalom.
See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God… Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.
1 John 3:1-2
Jesus tells us who the “children of God” are in the Sermon on the Mount.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Matthew 5:9
Advent never asks us, Scripture never asks us because God never asks us, to ignore the realities of the darkness of life. It never asks us to romanticize the difficulties and fears of life. What Advent does ask of us is to remember this is not the end. Maybe that’s difficult to believe. Maybe it feels beyond reach, but we can trust the message of Advent because once upon a time, 2,000 years ago, another beyond comprehension miracle took place on a lonely night.
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and she shall call him Immanuel.
Isaiah 7:14
Such as in his book, Surprised by Hope.
The work of The Bible Project, comes to mind.
I’m indebted to Randy Woodley, chiefly in his book Shalom and the Community of Creation, for the idea that shalom is more than just “peace,” as in the absence of struggle or warfare, but that is resonates most closely with the pan-indigenous idea(s) of harmony within Creation between all things.