Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand! It was of him [John the Baptist] that the prophet Isaiah had spoken…” writes Matthew in today’s Gospel. Perhaps we might hear the word “repent” as referring to numerous personal sins. Biblical scholars suggest that repent really means the restoring of right relationships, a personal and societal reorientation of life toward God. Our Hebrew Scripture today is from Isaiah’s 11th chapter. But just before this passage, Isaiah had been describing the Lord destroying the Assyrians so fiercely that even the glory of its forests and orchards will be consumed, soul and body … and the remnant of its trees … will be so few that any child can record them (Is 10:17-22). That dire picture he then contrasts with his lovely description of a restored order of relationships in the world. It is God’s new kingdom, called the peaceable kingdom, immortalized in art and common on Christmas cards. Notice that Isaiah’s word painting of the peaceable kingdom includes the human person, the little child to guide them. But it also includes the animals and the starry cosmos, so that the earth shall be filled with knowledge of the LORD (Is 11:9).
This connection between we humans “making straight his paths” and how all flesh, and indeed the whole cosmos, is also being put into right relationship is very relevant today as we address climate change. For the first time in human history, it seems, we are coming to consciousness about the relationship between what we humans do and what happens in our earth’s ecosystem. Today some theologians are writing about how salvation indeed applies to “all flesh,” understood as all life, plant and animal. This is the big picture our Scriptures invite us to contemplate today. For the Jesus we welcome at Christmas, and for whom we are preparing, is the saving Lord of the universe, its past, present and future. Perhaps we can find a little area of our own little universes where some “right relationship” work is needed.
— Blog entry by Sister Mary Garascia; Peaceable Kingdom by artist John August Swanson
The post December 7, Second Sunday of Advent, Peaceable Kingdom: a Sunday Scriptures blog first appeared on Sisters of the Precious Blood.