Lectionary Commentaries for December 7, 2025
Second Sunday of Advent

These December days are a time of pretty lights and pine trees, Christmas cookies and carols.

So the gospel comes as a shock: “You brood of vipers!” John the Baptist says (Matthew 3:7). Harsh words.

There is nothing pretty about John himself. He wears animal skins—“hair of camels,” the Greek says vividly—held together with a strip of leather for a belt. He eats locusts and wild honey (3:4). He looks like the prophet Elijah.

This description of John the Baptist calls up 2 Kings 1:7–8. When Ahaziah the king is lying injured, he sends messengers to the pagan god Baal-zebub to ask whether he will live or die. A man confronts them on the way. “Is there no God in Israel?” the man says. Why are you turning to Baal-zebub? This is the message you shall take to the king: “Therefore you shall surely die.” The king asks them what sort of man he was. “A hairy man,” they say, “with a leather belt around his waist.” “It is Elijah the Tishbite,” the king says.

“His clothing was camel’s hair,” Matthew says, “with a leather belt around his waist.”

The point is clear: John is like Elijah. John is like Elijah, who rebukes the king for forgetting God. John is like Elijah, who, in Jewish expectation at the time of Jesus, would come again when the reign of God was at hand.

When Matthew describes John the Baptist as Elijah, he is saying two things:

1. 1. 1. This is a time like that time: People are forgetting God. There is need for repentance. 
      2. This is the time Israel has been waiting for: The reign of God is at hand.

And this is exactly what John says, when he first comes on the scene: “Repent! For the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2).

When the people saw John in his hairy skin with a leather belt around his waist, eating locusts like a man of the desert, they would have known exactly what this meant: This is that day. This is the day of Elijah, the day when God’s reign is coming. And they would have heard the question John was asking: Are you ready? Can you stand before the face of the living God?

No wonder they flock to John to confess their sins, to be washed in the Jordan River—that river through which God, by the hand of Joshua, first brought Israel into the promised land. Another promised land is at hand!

As we read through their eyes, John the Baptist stands here in our lives on this second Sunday of Advent to remind us what we await this Christmas: It is God who is coming among us. It is his reign that is at hand. And if this is cause for joy—and it is, as all the lights and carols tell us—it is cause for repentance also.

We give lots of attention to the joy. But we need to hear the message of repentance also, because only then are we really hearing John’s message; only then are we really hearing what time this is.

Even before John appears in his hairy skins and leather belt, Matthew has told the reader what time this is.

“In those days,” Matthew says (3:1). These are the first words of today’s gospel. At first glance, this means just what it says: In the days when Jesus was in Galilee, John the Baptist came proclaiming repentance in the desert of Judea. 

But these are also the words with which the prophets, Jeremiah and Joel, announce “the day of the Lord,” the day of reckoning and of restoration.

Jeremiah says, “In those days and at that time [kairos] they will call Jerusalem the throne of God” (Jeremiah 3:17–18 Septuagint). 

In Jeremiah 5:18, “in those days” describes the time of God’s judgment upon Israel and also his promise that Israel will not be utterly destroyed. And in Jeremiah 33:15–16, “in those days and at that time,” God will cause a righteous Branch to spring up and bring justice to the land; Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will live in safety.

In Joel, in the midst of portents in the heavens and on earth, “in those days,” God restores the fortunes of his people and pours out his spirit upon all flesh (3:1; 2:28–32).

“In those days”—the words in Jeremiah and Joel and Matthew are exactly the same. This is the time the prophets spoke of, Matthew is saying. This is the day of the Lord.

John the Baptist is the one Isaiah spoke of: “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord!” (Matthew 3:3; Isaiah 40:3).

The people recognize who John is, what time this is. That is why they all go out to be baptized by him (Matthew 3:5). Even the leaders, the Pharisees and Sadducees, come out to be baptized.

And John berates them: “You brood of vipers!”

If Isaiah’s words promise forgiveness and restoration for God’s people “in those days,” John’s salvo against the leaders reminds us that the day of the Lord is also the time of judgment.

Wrath is coming “against all ungodliness and injustice,” as Paul says in Romans 1:18, and it is not enough to say that you repent and to be baptized. You must live it, too.

It is the hypocrisy of the leaders—the Pharisees and scribes and Sadducees—that Jesus objects to in Matthew’s gospel, that those who wear the mantle of priest or teacher or leader of the people should use their authority to sow lies and put burdens on people’s backs and care mostly for their own glory (see also Matthew 23:1–4).

Do not think, John the Baptist says, that because you call yourself a son of Abraham, because you call yourself a Christian, you are in the camp of the good (Matthew 3:9).

You must show the fruit (3:10). You have to act like a Christian, too. You have to seek to speak what is true. You have to listen to God and his word and his Christ, and not to your own whims, whatever they might be that day. You must bend the knee and let God be king.

“Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees” (3:10): It is an action shot, the woodcutter measuring his blow. Is the fruit good?

In these days, as we prepare in Advent to greet the newborn Christ, God sends John the Baptist to ask us to consider our fruit.

Last Sunday, the passage from Isaiah portrayed the unlikely image of hope: soldiers melting down their weapons and reshaping them into agricultural tools to feed a starving nation. Those images arose from the military realities that the small nation of Judah suffered in the years during and after the Assyrian invasion that occurred during Isaiah’s lifetime.

This Sunday, we get another stunning verbal painting stemming from the everyday lives of the ancient Judean communities. This time, instead of focusing on economic injustice, this vision imagines a world with a truly righteous ruler. In addition to plant imagery, the living creatures that surrounded them—both helpful and harmful—are added to the metaphor. 

Isaiah 11:1–10 paints a picture of bounty and universal peace set against a background filled with smoke, fires, and blood. Whether this was a poem performed by the historical prophet, or a later reflection on this dark historical moment, the juxtaposition of dreams and nightmares results in the contrasting images of the text.

The poem begins with images of the budding plant life of spring. This metaphor elicits hope with its promise of a new beginning. The historical setting of the poem is far removed from such emotions, however. Isaiah prophesied during the period when the Assyrians destroyed the northern tribes of Israel. Israel was an agricultural and political area far more fertile and therefore fortified than the southern tribe of Judah. After the destruction of these northern tribes, the Assyrians marched south and besieged Jerusalem, the capital and sacred center of the southern kingdom. 

The audience of Isaiah 11 is supposed to imagine the poem as recited, or perhaps even sung, to those inside a walled city, surrounded by a large army ready to invade, kill, and enslave Isaiah’s audience.

Perhaps the most graphic images are those of various animals, from predators to prey, in verses 6–8. The human audience looks on from afar at wolves and lambs, bears and cows, but the final pair hits home: babies and poisonous snakes living in close contact. Snakes, whether outside the city in the wilderness or inside one’s home, threatened the lives of the smallest and weakest humans. The pairing starts with a weaned child—in other words, one about four or five years old, who knows better than to play outside the city walls. This child’s activities are completely natural and innocent: playing, unaware of the threat that looms nearby. The second half intensifies the contrast, with the agentless baby or toddler sticking their hand into a random hole. 

These images engage the readers’ emotions, since childbirth was so precarious in ancient Israel. Between the trifecta of infant death, childhood disease, and maternal death, the ability to raise the next generation was always tenuous in this ancient culture. Threats came not just from invading armies, but also from predators in everyday life that fed off the livestock and their human caregivers, even in the best of times. The emotions engaged here are not the anger felt toward human enemies, but a mixture of futility, failure, and hopelessness by Judeans just trying to live their difficult lives. Asking them to imagine a world where lions lie down with baby calves is simply ridiculous.

But this ridiculousness asks us to reread the beginning of the poem: the idea of a political leader whose very being evokes justice, wisdom, and care for the weakest in the community. The imagined world is one where absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. The repetition of the word “spirit” depicts this ruler as innately wise and appropriately subordinate to God. 

The English translation of verse 3a does not adequately capture the emotion of the verse. The word translated “delight” can also mean “relish” or “joyfully value.” The phrase “fear of the LORD” expresses the proper attitude toward a deity that is ineffable. The wisdom of this ideal ruler results in their treasuring God as something Other and Holy. How unlike many of the depictions of Judah’s kings in other parts of the Bible!

This piety is also not self-serving. Verses 3b–5 focus on the king’s primary duty: to ensure justice throughout their kingdom. In the laws of ancient Israel, only landowners had full access to the justice system, leaving the poor, disenfranchised, and non-Israelites—especially women in these categories—without legal protections. While Isaiah 2 focused on people’s need for sustenance, here the passage focuses on what have become basic human rights. 

While any king would protect the rights of other elites, an ideal king extends that attitude toward everyone in the community. Those who oppose such equity and inclusion are here deemed “wicked.” The fact that this righteous rule results in a ridiculously altered natural world reflects a common trope in Near Eastern royal poetry.

It is difficult for Christians to hear this poem, especially during the season of Advent, and not think it celebrates the birth of Jesus. But it is important to remember that this yearning for a perfect world pre-dates and exists independently of the Christmas story. I think if people around the world were asked to draw a picture of a perfect world leader, that ruler would have many of these same attributes. 

We all know that one’s town or home can either be a place of refuge or an inescapable torment, depending on how that city or household is run. This Advent, we are asked once again to imagine. Can we dare to imagine a rule so ideal that even the hierarchical paradigms within the natural world transform into a landscape where the most natural enemies in our cosmos delight in just being together? No wonder this poem came to represent our deepest Christmas wish.

Psalm 72:1-17, a prayer of well-being for the king, was employed as part of a royal coronation or on the anniversary of the king’s accession.¹

Verses 18 and 19 are not part of the psalm proper. Instead, they constitute a later doxology that marks the end of Book II of the Psalter.³ Verse 20 appears to be yet another editorial commentary by a post-exilic redactor.   

The king and the king’s son mentioned in Psalm 72:1 are the same individual. The Royal Zion theology that undergirded the Davidic dynastic monarchy included the notion that the king’s relationship to God was as intimate as that of a son to a father (see 2 Samuel 7:8–16, especially verse 14; Psalm 2:7).

Psalm 72:1 establishes the themes of much of what follows. The petitioner asks that God imbue the king with God’s own justice (mispateka, “your justice”) and righteousness (sidqteka, “your righteousness”). Yes, petitions for the king’s long life also appear in the psalm (verses 5–6, 16). That concern, however, pales in importance when compared to the urgency that this king—and thus his reign—reflect God’s own regency. In other words, the king is to rule with the self-same justice and righteousness as would God if God sat on the palace throne. 

In particular, Psalm 72:2 includes a petition that the king should judge “your people” with righteousness. The verb translated “May he judge” is din. The term suggests that the king might redress the wrong done to God’s people and thus obtain justice for them by means of a righteous judgment.² The parallelism with verse 2b makes it clear that “your people” are Yahweh’s afflicted poor who stand in need of judgment:

May he judge your people with righteousness (besedeq),
                and your poor with justice (bemispat). 

The plea behind Psalm 72:2 reappears in verse 4. Once again, the anticipation is that the king might “defend” the cause of the poor, the needy, while eliminating their oppressor. The New Revised Standard Version translation, while correct, disguises the presence of the verbal root of justice, spt. The New Jerusalem Bible helpfully translates “he will judge,” thus clarifying the verb, albeit missing the jussive force of the petition. 

The psalm is not done with the theme of the king’s just treatment of the oppressed. The king will be successful and victorious (Psalm 72:9–10), and foreign regents will do obeisance to this king (verses 10–11), precisely because of his compassionate care for the needy, the poor, the helpless, and the oppressed (verses 12–14).

Because of the king’s righteous judgment and justice, the creation will persist and flourish, as will his subjects (Psalm 72:5–6, 16). The unspoken threat, of course, is that injustice for the poor and needy leads to the success of the king’s opponents (see Jeremiah 5:15–17) and to even the undoing of creation (see Hosea 4:2–3).

For most nations, the power of regents—if they exist at all—is extraordinarily limited. At first blush, therefore, it may seem that this psalm is irrelevant in our contemporary context. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Those living in representative democracies such as the United States, Canada, and Great Britain elect to office persons who will legislate on their behalf. This means that Christians have an opportunity and an obligation to elect representatives who will champion laws and policies that are consistent with faith and the values of the kingdom of God.

That last claim, of course, was the assertion of the so-called Moral Majority, a loud action group on the American political landscape during the 1980s. Therein, however, lies a cautionary tale. The Moral Majority’s agenda revolved around a narrowly defined understanding of what constitutes the Christian faith—for example, opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and to legal acceptance of LGBTQ people. The group’s leaders erroneously insisted that America was founded as a Christian nation and therefore Christians (again, as they defined Christians!) ought to control the government.

Should the preacher take up this psalm, she ought to be clear that this prayer for the king—like our prayers for our elected representatives—has nothing to do with a petition for Christian hegemony. Instead, the psalm centers on the hope that God will bestow upon leaders a measure of God’s justice and righteousness. 

A leader’s integrity, of course, is weighed on the scale of justice and righteousness, especially with regard to the poor, the needy and the oppressed. Jim Wallis, founding editor of Sojourners magazine, writes, “The Bible insists that the best test of a nation’s righteousness is how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable in its midst.”⁴ Wallis could easily point to Psalm 72 as evidence.

The regent (and our leaders) is to exercise authority on behalf of the poor, the needy, and the oppressed in the stead of God. In other words, leaders ought to be elected based on whether or not they give signs of helping those marginalized people about whom God is manifestly and particularly concerned. 

In the psalm, the success of the king and the durability of his reign depend entirely upon his saving the lives of the needy (Psalm 72:11–15). The biblical witness is that no regent, no empire, and no nation will long persist if God is mocked by a lack of justice and righteousness for the poor and oppressed.

For Christians who pray weekly, if not daily, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” it is surely not too much to insist that our elected leaders extend God’s justice and righteousness to the needy on our behalf. 

Failure to do so, it seems, puts us in opposition to God.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for December 8, 2019.
2. See similar expressions at the close of Book I (Psalm 41:13), Book III (Psalm 89:52), and Book IV (Psalm 106:48). Psalm 150—or the entire collection of doxological psalms contained in Psalms 146–150—marks the end of the Psalter’s Book V.
3. The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, vol. I, 220.
4. Jim Wallis, Who Speaks for God? (New York: Delacourt, 1996), 42.

As part of the climax of Paul’s letter to the Romans (14:1–15:13), the message of this section is as difficult as it is important. Its importance lies in the priority it assigns to harmonious relationships among Christ-followers. Its difficulty lies in the challenges of achieving and maintaining that harmony. Those challenges require both divine resources and new patterns of life among humans.

One major motif that is truly central not only here but in the letter as a whole is Paul’s affirmation of God’s faithfulness. This is evidenced in a variety of ways—in Paul’s references to God’s steadfastness (15:5) and God’s “truth” (that is, God’s fidelity), for example, and, especially, in the way he links texts from Israel’s Scriptures (15:9–12)—texts that demonstrate with respect to God’s promises to Israel and God’s acceptance of the gentiles that God can be trusted. Whatever expectations Paul places before these Christ-followers are set against the backdrop of God’s prevenience and faithfulness.

Key to making sense of what Paul expects of his audience is his initial call to mutual hospitality: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God” (15:7). Within this letter, this is a transparent reference to Jews welcoming gentiles, and vice versa.

In this, the conclusion to the body of Paul’s letter, this point follows from the apostle’s use of a catena (or chain) of scriptural texts. Drawn from Deuteronomy (32:43; Romans 15:10), Isaiah (11:10; Romans 15:12), and the Psalms (18:49 and 117:1; Romans 15:9 and 15:11), these quotations are linked primarily by their reference to the gentiles (or the nations), and secondarily by the motif of praise. 

Paul thus highlights God’s faithfulness to God’s promises regarding God’s place for the gentiles and, importantly, broadcasts the restoration of Israel realized in the common worship of God by the entire human family, Jew and gentile, united by their common hope in the one Messiah (15:7–8, 12–13). It is hardly coincidental that the apostle has come full circle from the opening of this letter, with its emphases on the risen Christ anticipated in the Scriptures (1:2–5) and on a humanity joined in its turning away from the worship of God (1:18–32).

Given the immediately preceding discussion of the weak and the strong (14:1–15:3), it is equally clear that the apostle’s concern and encouragement are now also aimed at an internal strife that seems to be rooted in differences of observance related to calendars and diet. On the one hand, Paul’s instruction underscores in no uncertain terms the priority of harmony in the family of believers and unity in shared praise of God. As he makes clear, food and drink should not lead to breaking ranks with each other; they are not essential to God’s royal rule (or “kingdom,” 14:17).

Differences of opinion and practice like this open opportunities not for disunity nor for mere tolerance of diversity, but for open-handed acceptance of each other and such differences. Moreover, this open-handed acceptance does not require or depend on brothers and sisters first changing their minds or agreeing with each other. 

Later, Tertullian (circa 160–circa 225 CE) would imagine pagans saying of Christ-followers, “Look, how they love each other … and how they are ready to die for each other!” (Apologeticus 39.7); what he does not say is, “Look, how they agree with each other!” Human flourishing—joy, peace, and hope (15:13)—depends on God’s gift and on the work of the Holy Spirit (15:5, 13), to be sure, but also on following the cruciform, diaconal example of Christ Jesus (14:15, 18; 15:5, 8).

On the other hand, the very harmony on which Paul insists is difficult even to imagine, to say nothing of practice. Broadly speaking, this is because of the human tendency to join with others “like us,” so that difference cultivates divisiveness, resulting in walls guaranteeing all sorts of segregation (for example, economic, racial, life-stage, family status, ethnic).

For communities of Christ-followers, then and now, perhaps the most pressing, lingering question for how best to appropriate Paul’s instruction is the challenge of discerning what is and is not central to God’s royal rule. Here, pointedly, Christ-devotees are to be unified in their worship of God and hope in Christ, not separated by ethnicity, by different attitudes toward food and drink, or by diverse calendrical observances. 

What, then, of present struggles within the church over worship practices or missional commitments? In relation to the church and world, what of, say, immigration or climate change? Paul’s bottom line is both important and challenging: The ideal of harmony could not be clearer. It represents both God’s creational purpose and God’s eschatological telos. And this raises the stakes on the question: Given God’s faithfulness and the unifying work of God’s Spirit, how do we cultivate life patterns marked by hospitality to those unlike ourselves?