Lectionary Commentaries for November 30, 2025
First Sunday of Advent

Never, perhaps, has this Advent gospel been more timely. “Watch!” Jesus says in Matthew 24:36–44, the conclusion to his apocalyptic discourse. “Stay awake!” 

It is timely as the culture, especially in North America and Europe, grows increasingly secular and the “mainline” churches are shrinking so fast that the market can’t keep up with the new condo builds in old church buildings (or so it is, at least, in my country, Canada).

But even where the church is thriving—in many parts of Asia and Africa, for instance—violence that denies the peace of Christ, along with the suppression of Christian faith, is real. 

In these different contexts, there is need for Christians to “stay awake”—to keep eyes, hearts, hands, and minds on Christ and on the hope of his coming—working for him, watching for him, living under his lordship and in the light of his grace.

But Jesus warns in this passage that “staying awake” is tricky.

After all, you do not know, Jesus says, when “the day of the Lord” is coming. Easy, then, to forget about it, to fall asleep.

The use of “know” in this passage is striking. 

As in Mark, Jesus in Matthew begins with not knowing: “Concerning that day and hour no one knows” (Matthew 24:36; see also Mark 13:32). 

It will be like Noah’s flood, Jesus goes on: They’re all eating, drinking, marrying, paying no attention to Noah, crazy man, building a boat under a cloudless sky—and then in a flash the flood is upon them.

Floods happen that way, as the people of Jesus’ country knew and know.

There are wadis in that land, in Israel, Egypt, North Africa—valleys that slice through the dry land. A wadi is dry and empty most of the year, enticing for a hike or a picnic. But come a sudden rain, and in no time, a wadi becomes a lethal, raging river. One spring, when I was a child living briefly in Tunisia, an English family visiting the country did just what a wadi invites you to do: They had a picnic, Mom and Dad and two kids, in a nearby wadi. They did not know about wadis. There they were, eating and drinking, when out of sight, the storm began, and in a flash the torrent was upon them, crashing down through the wadi without any warning at all. “And the flood came and swept them all away” (24:39).

You do not know when it is coming, Jesus says, the day of my Parousia. 

But we do know that it is coming. Not when, but that the day is coming, the day on which the reign of God will be spread abroad over the world like the dawn: This, we know; this, Jesus’ people know. All Christ’s people through all the ages know about the hope of God’s reign. Jesus is telling us in this gospel reading today.

The English family did not know about wadis. But the locals knew, the locals know, and so they watch and do not picnic in a wadi.

We are the locals in the world of God’s purpose, so it is our job to watch. It is our job in this world to be the people who stay awake, who with their whole lives watch for Jesus.

Jesus uses the word “know” again in this passage (and here, Jesus’ discourse in Matthew is different from his discourse in Mark): “So watch,” Jesus says, “keep awake” (24:42)—because here’s something you do know: If the homeowner had known that the thief was going to break in at 3 a.m., you can be sure he would have been watching (24:43).

You know that the day of the Lord is coming like a thief in the night … so watch for it! Watch for him. “Therefore, you, too, be ready!” (24:44).

“You,” Jesus says in Matthew 24:44. He uses the Greek pronoun “you,” plural, which he doesn’t have to use. In ancient Greek, as in Spanish or Italian—and in English in an imperative statement—the pronoun is built into the verb: “Go!” “Be ready!” That’s all you have to say. “You” is understood. So, here, Jesus could just say, “Be ready!” But he doesn’t. He says: “You be ready, you too, you especially.” Because you know that the day of the Lord is coming like a thief in the night.

The thief in the night: such a counterintuitive image for the day we long for, when justice springs up from the earth and mercy rains down from the heavens, that day of the reign of God. 

It has an echo in Joel 2:9, in his image of the day of the Lord as a horde of locusts coming down upon the land, wreaking sudden destruction: “They enter through the windows like a thief.” In Joel it is an image of judgment upon a people who have forgotten God and his good, and who find themselves reaping the whirlwind. 

Jesus Christ as thief? Shocking, and thus effective: Jesus wants us to pay attention. So much rests on being ready, on knowing what really matters as you go about your days. It is the difference between a life and a world lived toward what is good and true, and a life and a world that fritters away its days.

As Christ’s people, we know what the endgame is—the grace and truth at the end of all things. “You be ready,” Jesus says. As you live a life that is ready, always watching for Jesus’ face—watching, working, hoping, praying for the whole world to see his wounded hands raised in judgment and in grace—your life may be a sign for others … a little like Noah building his ark.

You be ready.

Advent is the time the church year gives us to remember what we know. The day of the Lord is coming: Be ready. Get ready! In the midst of the eating and drinking and marrying, the Christmas preparations and parties, the cookie-baking and shopping, Advent gives people time to remember what we know. It is Jesus who is coming, now as a child at Christmas, to be God-with-us in forgiveness and grace; then, on that day of God, as Lord of all, in righteousness and truth.

Perhaps this gospel invites us to be Noah this Advent: to stand in the midst of the busy world, watching and praying and reading the Scriptures; waiting most of all, as Christmas comes, for Christ.

Isaiah 2:1–5 welcomes congregations to Advent across the globe. As the first scriptural reading of the first Sunday of Advent, the image of nations flocking to God’s holy mountain, converting their weapons of personal and mass destruction into tools that feed the world, provides a preview of the ending of the liturgical year. 

Reading the text outside of its canonical context and inside this year’s liturgical one provides an invitation to recognize the text’s multivalent potential, connecting ancient worlds and modern assemblies. Within the book of Isaiah, these five verses of stunning hope are embedded in two chapters of vitriolic judgment on the book’s narrative audience.

The beginning of chapter 2 in Isaiah sharply contrasts with the surrounding material in both style and content. Instead of divine decrees condemning the leadership of ancient Judah and forecasting defeat of the nation, these verses imagine an idyllic future in which Judah becomes the center of the world. Instead of foreign nations as enemies who will carry out God’s terrible sentence, here they flock to the temple as a sign of Yahweh’s universal rule.

The passage opens with the statement that what follows is a vision that the prophet Isaiah experienced. Isaiah lived during a very turbulent time in Israel’s history. The Assyrians were attempting to establish an empire that would include Egypt. In order to achieve this worldwide power, they first had to defeat all the smaller kingdoms in what is modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. As they conquered city after city, they deported the indigenous populations to various locations under their rule to serve as cheap labor supporting the war effort. 

At this time, no longer was Israel comprised of 12 tribes under a single king. Instead, it had split into two distinct monarchies: Israel in the north with 10 tribes, and Judah in the south with two. The Assyrian army, following the highways of the Fertile Crescent, would have advanced from north to south. They sacked Israel’s capital city, Samaria, in 722 BCE and continued their march southward, arriving at Jerusalem, Judah’s capital, around 700. 

Isaiah was a prophet who worked for the monarchy in Judah at this time. Although Assyria defeated almost every city it besieged, Jerusalem escaped this fate because of a civil war in Assyria’s capital that required the return of the army. The people of Jerusalem saw this as a miracle: Their God had saved them, due in part to Isaiah’s intercession on their behalf.

These verses may reflect that immediate period of joy as those inside the besieged city watched the enemy pack up their beasts of burden and march back north. Certainly, that would have been an occasion for joy and wonder. Why not dream big, in such a moment? 

Isaiah 2:1–5 asks you to listen to a prophetic voice that magnifies this miraculous moment. Isaiah himself sings, “If you think that was amazing, just wait! Someday, these very same enemies will return here to this city, not in hostility and violence, but in humility and kindness.” Note that the nations come back because they realize that Israel’s God is the source of wisdom. They come to learn.

Once they have been “schooled,” then and only then can the audience’s imagination be let loose. “Imagine what we could do,” the prophet seems to say, “if we lived in a world where there were no more wars. If we lived among people with shared values and a shared humility.” I think about that a lot these days. What could we do with all the money and resources, natural and human, that we spend on active and anticipatory wars? 

The book of Isaiah does not stay there for very long. After five short verses, the prophet’s vision dissipates, and the same old human folly enters back in. These verses are more than a commercial break in the action, however. They keep hope alive, over the course of centuries, even when the darkest days remain. The flavor of the vision tastes sweeter set amid the bitterness of their reality.

Advent provides room for the conflicted feelings many of us feel about the future that God intends for us. On the one hand, the Christmas journey is not the story of a baby; it is an epic of hope in the form of deep tragedy. Joseph’s feelings of fear, acceptance, and joy map out the emotions of this strange narrative arc. 

But the lectionary reminds us that this is not a new story. The emotions tied to the temple, which for its audience was a concrete representation of God’s real presence among the community, resonate with the stubborn assertion that what we see now is not the whole story: Whether it is a temple that has lost its glory or a baby in a backwater town, if these cannot be sites of hope, then hope is not possible.

Many people listening to sermons this Advent have the same conflicted emotions, but too often church settings appear to only validate the hope and filter out despair. I am not alone in dreading watching the news anymore, whether it is local, national, or global. Where can there be hope in that? But Isaiah 2 reminds us that if we can afford to build weapons, then we can choose instead to feed the nations, metaphorically and literally. Whether our weapons are missiles or missives, warheads or words, we can choose which to build: armies that destroy each of us, or sacred sites that feed all of us.

Advent is a delightfully mixed message.¹ It is a season of judgment: John the Baptist announces fire and then Jesus brings it.

And yet it is also a season of joy. Psalm 122 is then the perfect Advent psalm, for it is full of gladness (Psalm 122:1). It is a delight to come up into the city of David and to rejoice there. A sermon on this psalm should be full of delight. Even, or especially, with a hint of judgment (verse 5).

This psalm has often served as a textbook example for the medieval church’s fourfold approach to biblical interpretation. What is Jerusalem? It is, first and most obviously, a city in Palestine. It is also, allegorically speaking, the church (Galatians 4:26). It is also the faithful soul. And it is, finally, the city of God, coming down out of heaven from God (Revelation 21:2).

Modern approaches to the Bible make the odd assumption that texts have only one referent—the one in the author’s head when pen was first put to paper. The actual referents of a text hinge more on questions like these: What does God mean in this passage? What does the gathered community need to hear from these words? How can the good news lodge in my soul and make it a roomier place for God and the neighbor? How do we realign our longings aright for the new creation God is birthing, right in the midst of the old?

Jerusalem, a city in Palestine

First, an actual city. You can go to Jerusalem right now, more easily than ever in human history. Walking around the old city one night, I noticed how tired my calves were. I was going up—literally—and uphill hurts! Pilgrims traipsed up and down and back up for days, and then roared with delight when they first glimpsed the city, when they came within the safety of its gates, when they entered the place where they could attain justice there like nowhere else.

This psalm gives a literal directive like few psalms do: Pray for Jerusalem. Right now. Stop what you’re doing and pray for its peace, for on its peace hangs the peace of the world.

The specificity of Jerusalem demonstrates the biblical teaching of the scandal of particularity. Human notions of fairness, including many biblical ones, assume God shows no favorites. But the scandal of particularity says that God lives at One Temple Way in Jerusalem. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote of the city, “Here the trees praise, the streets say grace, and my steps give thanks. The way of Jerusalem is a way of exaltation.”²

Jerusalem, the church

Jerusalem is also the church. Ancient Christians saw the church in the ascent of the gentiles up Mount Zion, which Israel’s Scripture prophesied would come at the end of the world (Isaiah 2:1–5). God’s deliverance of Israel would be so astounding that even gentiles would notice and join in with the tribes going up for worship (Psalm 122:4).

Delight is contagious. St. Augustine asked his hearers to “call to mind a scene familiar to you.” Folks assemble at a holy place and “incite one another” so that we “catch fire with enthusiasm and all the separate flames unite.”³ The church is a people alight for God, merged into a single soul.

Jerusalem, the faithful soul

Soul talk has not fared overly well in modernity. We have been right to emphasize the bodily, the this-worldly, the corporality of Israel, Jesus, and church. And yet these passages have to mean something spiritually. Preachers know this—we can’t leave the cookies on the high shelf. We have to say why the stories matter for the lives of those gathered for good news.

St. John Chrysostom did so when he pondered the fact that Israel wrote and then treasured this psalm from exile—that is, from a place where she was physically incapable of going up to Jerusalem. “This is the way God generally does things: when we do not appreciate the good things we have, God knocks them from our hands.”⁴

This is not the only spiritual interpretation of the psalm, of course; there are literally countless more. As a preacher, you have to deliver one or more of them—your listeners are hungry, and you’re tasked to feed them (Luke 11:11–12).

Jerusalem, the city of God

Fourth and finally, the city God is bringing: Christians pray for it regularly in Jesus’ prayer. He had a hard time in his father David’s city. He went up regularly, as commanded here and elsewhere. His parents should have known he was not lost, but was teaching in its temple (Luke 2:41–51). Yet the city evokes his tears: It kills the prophets and would eventually kill him (Luke 13:31–35).

Jerusalem is the navel of the world in Jewish imagination, the umbilical cord by which God feeds the cosmos. In this age, that place of life has often been a place of death. Just have a look at the news. Prayer shaped by this psalm asks that the place meant for life, that we distort into a place of death, would become a site of resurrection. Let its walls be peace, its towers be security, its multiple generations be bound together, its good be ours and also the whole world’s. Prayer seeks to align our desire with God’s, first for Israel’s blessing and then for all the world’s.

Advent is a forward-looking time. Just as Christ came in fulfillment of God’s long-standing promises, so too he will come again and consummate those promises. The throbbing desire pulsing through these words of the ancient psalmist should pulse anew through our church’s life together as we await the babe in Bethlehem, the king coming on the clouds.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for December 1, 2019.
2. Quoted in Stephen Breck Reid, Psalms for Preaching and Worship, ed. Van Harn and Strawn (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 316–318.
3. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, vol. 6, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004), 14.
4. John Chrysostom, Commentary on the Psalms, vol 2, trans. Robert Charles Hill (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1998), 147.

Paul has just set out a series of imperatives for faithful life in the world (Romans 13:1–10), centered on the Christ-follower’s relationship to governmental authorities, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the love command as the fulfillment of God’s Instructions (torah). Before moving on to contextualize the meaning of the love command with respect to divisive attitudes and practices within the Christ-following communities (14:1–15:13; see 14:15), he introduces this interlude—a powerful and profound portrait of the challenge of faithful living in this world, painted on the larger mural of the good future God has prepared for God’s people. 

Providing an eschatological warrant for present faithfulness, Paul directs attention to the end-time return and final triumph of Jesus Christ. He thus paints the church as an eschatological community. God’s people follow the way of salvation, but this present time and place do not mark the end of salvation. Christ-followers should act as people on the way, not as people who imagine they have already found in this world their “forever home.”

The contrasts Paul draws are both stark and telling: asleep/awake; night/day; works of darkness/armor of light; lay aside/put on; darkness/light; live honorably/reveling, drunkenness, debauchery, and licentiousness (Common English Bible: “partying and getting drunk … sleeping around and obscene behavior”); put on the Lord Jesus Christ/nourish the flesh. One set of images describes life in the Roman world, especially for those with some means. The other depicts the new form of existence of those who have aligned themselves with Jesus, placed their confidence in him, and declared their allegiance to him. One describes life under the lordship of Caesar. The other describes life under the Lordship of Christ. 

And here lies the challenge: Those who name Jesus as Lord continue to live in Caesar’s world. They are pressed in both directions at once. Accordingly, Paul reminds his audience that faithful response to Jesus cannot be described as “one and done.” Waking from sleep, putting on the armor of light, putting on the Lord Jesus Christ—these are and must be everyday practices. Paul encourages Christ-followers to such ongoing decisions and actions by reminding them that, in this way, they will remain alert to the coming of the End, which could happen at any moment.

Four of Paul’s images invite further consideration: 

Asleep / awake

The states of being asleep and awake are well known in New Testament texts dealing with staying alert, being in the know, or being prepared for the End. In Mark’s Gospel, for example, Jesus instructs his followers, “Therefore, keep awake, for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening or at midnight or at cockcrow or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly” (Mark 13:35–36; see Matthew 13:25; 24:42; 25:13; Mark 13: 37; 1 Thessalonians 5:6; Revelation 16:15).

In Romans 13, this conceptual metaphor functions pointedly to contrast two forms of life: one marked by the night (that is, giving in to one’s sinful cravings) and the other marked by the day (that is, living under Jesus Christ’s Lordship).

Throwing off / putting on

When Paul counsels his audience to “throw off” and “put on” (13:12, 14), he is drawing on the concrete, physical act of undressing and dressing to structure his audience’s understanding of the more abstract idea of exchanging one personal state or identity for another. The effect is similar to Jesus’ words in Mark’s Gospel, where he defines discipleship in part as denying oneself and taking up the cross (Mark 8:34).

Paul’s metaphor constitutes far more than covering oneself with a new robe, say, or temporarily assuming a new persona (as in the theater). Rather, he is referring to a theological or moral change. His metaphor works because, in the ancient Mediterranean world, it was commonly understood that one’s internal dispositions and allegiances were on public display in one’s behavior and relationships (see, for example, Ephesians 4:20–24; Colossians 3:8–10; James 3:21).

Works of darkness / armor of light

In its immediate literary context, “armor of light” is set in contrast with “works of darkness” (13:12). Moreover, it is set parallel with “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul thus speaks of a life of purity and integrity in which one grows into Christlikeness, more and more taking on the character of Christ. His use of the image of “armor,” though, marks the process of becoming like Christ in military terms.

The apostle seems to envision a battle against both the press of one’s own cravings and the press of the corrupt patterns of life characteristic of Roman life. Similar language appears in Ephesians 6:10–18, where the battle is more straightforwardly executed against “the wiles of the devil.” In the book of Isaiah, images of God as the Divine Warrior (see also Psalms 93–100) find their parallel in human armament—for example, a belt of righteousness, a sash of faithfulness, shoes of the good news of peace (Isaiah 11:5; 49:2; 52:7; 59:17).

Imminent expectation / unknown timing

Paul sounds the note of imminent expectation in this short paragraph: “You know what time it is. … Salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone; the day is near” (Romans 13:11–12). This is often heard as a reference to his (mistaken) notion that Jesus would return shortly, perhaps in Paul’s own lifetime.

Both in the first century and today, though, it makes good sense to think rather of the unknown timing of the End (whether of one’s life or of the eschaton). The End cannot be calendared, any more than one can predict the timing of one’s own demise. Given this uncertainty, Paul is urging that the appropriate response is everyday faithfulness.