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Second Sunday of Advent, Year A, December 9, 2007

First reading, Isaiah 11:1-10

The Historical Background: In the late eighth century B.C.E., God's people are already divided into a northern kingdom, called Israel, and southern kingdom known as Judah. Israel is already under the heel of Assyria, while Judah and its capital Jerusalem are quite shaky. As early as chapter 1 of this book, Isaiah has been criticizing Jerusalem and its king for faithlessness. In this passage, he wants to stir up hope among his people, hope that God would soon intervene dramatically to change their world and their fortunes, by the advent of a new king. To describe the king in hopeful, recognizable terms, Isaiah reaches for an image from their glorious past. Their national pride had peaked during the kingship of David, about four centuries earlier. Ever after, Israel hoped for a new David, ready to give him, when he would come, the royal title Messiah. (See Lector's Notes for the recent feast of Christ the King for more detail.) Now David had been the son of Jesse. When the prophet speaks of a shoot (a branch) sprouting from the stump of Jesse, he means a new king in the family of Jesse and David.

Your Proclamation: This Messiah's first qualities are his wisdom and fairness; he'll know what's right, he'll see through the self-serving lies of the wicked, he'll make things fair for the powerless. To proclaim the first paragraph of this reading correctly, feel again the outrage you've felt about dishonest politicians, monopolistic business moguls who pollute our world with impunity, school board members who push their personal single-issue agendas, gangsters who escape conviction.

The sentence about the wolf and the lamb marks a slight break in the thought, and you should pause there. While the prior sentences were about the qualities of the coming king, the next are about the state of the world under that king's reign. Pause again before the last sentence ("On that day, the root of Jesse ..."), because the so-called root of Jesse is the new king, on whom our focus should be.

Second Reading, Romans 15:4-9

Some of the Theological Background: To grasp the import of this dual purpose, refer to Romans, chapters 9, 10, & 11. There, Paul executes a marvelous inquiry into how the Jews could have forfeited their chosen status by rejecting Jesus. As a faithful Jew, he was really bothered by this, and he labors over the solution. What he finally declares is that the Jews' rejection of Jesus gave the few believers the impetus to take the gospel to the Gentiles, until then outside the scope of God's mercy. This was God's plan all along. The Jews will catch on and accept Jesus when they see the Gentile world converting. Lector's Notes covered this in somewhat greater detail on the 21st Sunday of Ordinary Time, year A. This is the struggle and solution that led Paul to exclaim "How deep are the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God!" (Romans 12:33).

And this is what's behind Paul's assertion in today's passage that Christ became the servant of the Jews (or, as some translations would have it, "a minister of the circumcised") "because of God's faithfulness in fulfilling the promises to the patriarchs," that is, the promise to make the descendants of the patriarch Abraham God's special Chosen People. This amounts to mercy for the Gentiles, too, because their sinful status and their outsider status are being reversed as they accept the gospel.

Proclaiming It: We can imagine Paul quite full of hope and joy as he wrote this. He's solved a great, painful mystery, and he's in awe of the goodness and wisdom of God. Those are the feelings that he'd like to stir up in anyone who hears, or proclaims, these words.

And there is that nicety about the historical differences between Jew and Gentile, now overcome. Blessed is that assembly where the preacher takes this on, because it's a hard idea to grasp from Paul's words alone. You can help by using your tone of voice to make sure people know that something changed for the Gentiles because it changed first for the Jews.

Several other commentaries on these passages. All are thoughtful, all quite readable, from the scholarly to the popular. Links may be incomplete more than a few weeks before the "due date."
Lutheran pastor and college teacher Dan Nelson's notes for a study group	Father Frank Cleary's 2001 column on the first reading.	The Text This Week; links to homilies, art works, movies and other resources on the week's scripture themes
Father Roger Karban's column about these readings from 2001, and his 1998 reflection on the same readings.		A great variety of resources about celebrating the Sunday and understanding the readings, from the Center for Liturgy at Saint Louis University.