Second Sunday of Advent

I have some rose bushes in my back garden and they gave wonderful roses this summer. Every spring the rose bushes need to be pruned right back. After pruning they look as if they could never produce another rose, but from the stump new life soon emerges and the climax of that new life is an array of roses that give off a lovely fragrance.

I was reminded of that phenomenon of nature by the beginning of today’s first reading. Isaiah sees a shoot springing from a tree stump, a new branch emerging from an old root. It reminds him of the stock or stump of Jesse, the father of David. The line of kings from David onwards had died out, even though God had promised to remain faithful to David and his descendants. Yet, Isaiah has a vision of new life coming from this apparently lifeless stump. A new king will emerge, a descendent of David. He will be filled with the Spirit of God. As a result, he will be a person of integrity and faithfulness, who will bring God’s justice to the weak and the poor. His coming will be good news for the most vulnerable, but bad news for the ruthless. At a time when there was little reason for optimism Isaiah had this wonderful hopeful vision. As Christians we recognize Jesus as the king that Isaiah foretold. He was the one on whom the Spirit of God rested in a unique way. He announced that the Spirit of God was upon him to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free.

The season of Advent invites us to catch something of the hopeful spirit of Isaiah. Saint Paul states at the beginning of the second reading that ‘everything that was written long ago in the scriptures was meant to teach us something about hope from the examples scripture gives us of how people who did not give up were helped by God’. The prophet Isaiah was one of those hope-filled figures in the Scriptures who never gave up, and he was helped by God. God spoke through him to bring hope to a discouraged people. The Scriptures are full of people of hope who never gave up, and who were helped by God. Their hope was rooted in their faith in a God who is always at work, creating something new, often out of what has failed. Jesus was certainly such a person of hope who never gave up. His hope was rooted in his faith in God his Father whom he knew to be a God of the living, a God who is always at work bringing new life out of death. Even as Jesus hung from the cross, when all hope seemed to have been dashed, Jesus could make the most hopeful of promises to the criminal hanging alongside him, ‘Today, you will be with me in Paradise’. Jesus was supremely hopeful and hope-giving.

In this season of Advent, when we pray, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’, we are inviting the Lord to fill us with his hope. When we look at our world, our society, and, sometimes, at own lives, we can easily get discouraged. We can find ourselves in a darkness of spirit. It is above all at such times that we need to pray, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’, asking him to fill us with his hopeful spirit. If we allow the Lord to live in us, we will be hopeful in regard to our world, our society, our church and our own lives. Jesus had a way of seeing beneath the unpromising surface of things to the stirrings of new life that were there. He looked at people with hopeful eyes, seeing who they could become with God’s help, the help of the Holy Spirit. Whereas many dismissed Zacchaeus as a sinner, Jesus saw the potential for good in him. Whereas many of his fellow Jews would have dismissed the Samaritan woman as a heretic or worse, Jesus saw her as the future apostle to the Samaritans. Whereas Peter dismissed himself as a sinner, Jesus saw him as the leader of the group of twelve he was gathering around himself. Jesus could see that everything was possible to God. He could have echoed the words of John the Baptist in today’s gospel reading, ‘God can raise children for Abraham from these stones’. Indeed Jesus’ message turned out to be more hopeful than John the Baptist might have expected. Whereas in our gospel reading John speaks about the axe being laid to the root of a tree that fails to bear good fruit, Jesus spoke a parable in which the gardener argued that more time be given to a tree that wasn’t bearing fruit, so that it could be further nurtured. Like Isaiah, Jesus looked at what seemed as good as dead and saw the potential for new life.

This is the way the Lord looks upon each one of us. He is always hopeful in our regard because he knows who we can become with the help of the Holy Spirit. What he asks for from us is that, in the words of the second reading, we refuse to give up on ourselves, on others, or on our world.