Читать книгу Twelve Months of Sundays - N.T. Wright - Страница 10

The Second Sunday of Advent

Isaiah 11.1–10

Romans 15.4– 13

Matthew 3.1– 12

‘His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord’ (Isaiah 11.3). Yes, no doubt, but the Hebrew word for ‘delight’ actually means ‘smell’. This may be just a metaphor, borrowed perhaps from the cultic contexts in which God delights in the pleasing odour of sacrifices, but the reason for taking it thus is our modern, Western downgrading of the sense of smell as the most accurate judge of situations and people. It may sound absurd to us, but to this day in several cultures there are people who stand at the doors of churches, and for that matter mosques, and refuse people admission on the grounds that they carry with them a scent of evil. Some animals, of course, can arrive at accurate judgements of people on similar grounds.

The point of this surprising comment in Isaiah is that the Messiah, when he comes, will judge with fine-honed accuracy. Eyes may deceive; ears may listen to powerful voices; but the Messiah’s justice will have a sense of smell, attuned by the fear of the Lord, through which wickedness will be identified and dealt with. Out of this sharp-edged judgement, cutting through the fuzzy half-truths with which so much of our human discourse is saturated, will come the time of peace, of harmony, of wolves lying down with lambs, of the earth being full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (And how do the waters cover the sea? They are the sea.)

The passage from Romans is a hangover from the old Bible Sunday readings (see 15.4 in particular), but it happily echoes Isaiah’s theme anyway. Paul swaps the prophet’s animals for humans: instead of wolves and lambs, Jews and Gentiles are brought together in harmony. All is based on the work of the Messiah, who has fulfilled the promises to Israel (v. 8) precisely in order that the whole world might now glorify God for his mercy. Despite the persistent idea that the gospel message to Gentiles had to be de-Judaized, Paul sees that what the world needs is precisely the Jewish message that the creator God is bringing his justice to bear on the world by fulfilling his promises to Israel. This is, of course, precisely what the previous fourteen chapters of Romans are about: the messianic work through which God’s justice/righteousness (I’m still waiting for offers of a word which carries both meanings) is brought to bear on all creation.

Isaiah again, this time in Matthew 3. The ‘voice’ was to prepare the way for YHWH to come, back through the desert from Babylon or wherever else he had hidden, back to Israel in justice and redemption. And there in the wilderness was John preparing the way for the Messiah who would come and separate the wheat from the chaff. The waters that would flood the world with the knowledge of the Lord must first sweep over Israel in cleansing and mercy.