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.

Commentary for this text is forthcoming.

Commentary for this text is forthcoming.