Fr Peter Helman

Dear friends,

The oracle from the eighth-century Jewish prophet Isaiah appointed ‪this Monday morning lends readers a bracing scene for the first week of Advent.

(Reading the passage, what are your questions and impressions?)

From one angle, we're given a view into the heavenly court and set in the public gallery. We're made witnesses to a hearing over which the Lord most highest presides. The Lord adjudicates right from wrong and brings a charge against Jerusalem and the house of Judah.

The house of Judah has enacted the prescribed appointment of ritual sacrifices: burnt-offerings of rams and goats and lambs and the fat of fed beasts and incense oblations. Jerusalem has celebrated with adulation the calendar of holy days: new moons, solemn assemblies, convocations, festivals, and sabbaths.

But something in their adherence is amiss. The people of Judah display only to the trappings of religious devotion without being given over to the power of God, through love, to become transformed.

The fact is that violence is still heard in their land, ruin and destruction within their borders. The fabric of life in their families and communities is rent asunder and bears out the truth of things as they are. They have taken the Name of the Lord their God on their lips as a bride. The rich have sent the empty away. The proud are satisfied in the imaginings of their hearts. The machinations of power have made the promised land a din of thieves, another lair to which the wicked retreat in self-confidence to count the spoils.

And so, the Lord contends with them:

“When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings
from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.”

God summons Jerusalem at pangs of death to inhabit the true shape of devotion and therefore sets before them a choice:

"If you are willing and obedient,
you shall eat the good of the land;
but if you refuse and rebel,
you shall be devoured by the sword;
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

I wager this is a difficult and thus all the more fitting passage for you and me to confront at the beginning of Advent because from another, perhaps more deeply honest angle we read Isaiah's oracle and ask whether we stand amid the company of the sinners.

Bought with a price, as we are, our lives hidden with God in Christ, as they are, the sad news is we still sin and so often make excuses for sin and, from time to time, even make God’s love and mercy to be for us, as we might require it, merely a salve to palliate the conscience. And as God did with Judah through the prophet Isaiah, God does with us too: says no to sin, makes no friend of it, and calls us back, teaching us to hope for salvation.

We are about more than trappings.

We are loved by God, and that's the heart of the matter. And at holy days like these--and thus every day--we set about the work of predisposition, giving ourselves again again to that which we all face something of: God's desire.

There is great freedom in the confession of our need for God's love and mercy, which by grace creep into our breasts. It is the advent of that mercy that we celebrate at Christmas and for which we are now being prepared.

What is God speaking to your heart this morning? Brace yourself for love and what may come.


Yours in Christ,
Fr. Peter