Lectionary Commentaries for December 14, 2025
Third Sunday of Advent

Matthew 11:2–11 captures a prison correspondence between John the Baptist and Jesus. Jesus learns of John’s arrest at the beginning of his ministry in Galilee (Matthew 4:12). But it is not until well into Jesus’ public teaching and healing that the two regain contact in Matthew 11. In the chapter prior to their correspondence, Jesus teaches about the costs and rewards that accompany discipleship. He warns his followers of the persecutions they will face, including being “dragged before kings and governors” (Matthew 10:18), a fate similar to John’s. Jesus reminds his followers that his message is meant to disrupt the world (why?), bringing a sword rather than peace. 

John becomes an example of the cost of such ministry and its disruption of the Roman concept of peace, for while the Pax Romana celebrated imperial peace and prosperity, it was only achieved through conquest and exploitation of peoples and resources. John’s baptismal ministry and messianic message stood in stark contrast to the Pax Romana. This bold critique landed him in prison.   

John the Baptist in prison

In prison, John is in a vulnerable, liminal space. Roman prisons were spaces where one awaited trial or execution, unlike the long-term incarceration practices we are familiar with today. While being imprisoned was not meant as an ultimate punishment, it was a place of physical violence and psychological terror. Prisons were filthy, overcrowded, and devoid of natural light. Sanitation and basic resources like clean water were scarce. Beatings and restraints limited movement and stripped autonomy. 

The space and practices within prison were meant to evoke fear and shame. They were reminders of Roman power over a subject’s life and death. Incarceration helped maintain social hierarchy, which was a foundation of the Pax Romana. Imprisonment particularly impacted members of the lower social status and non-citizens, as those with greater means could be placed under house arrest. 

Despite how prison was intended to instill fear and shame not only in the incarcerated but in their loved ones, John is not abandoned by his followers. John’s community remains in regular contact with him. This is particularly important because John is dependent on his community for his survival on multiple levels. 

Physically, ancient prisons did not provide for the basic needs of the incarcerated, such as food and clothing. Thus, the community of the incarcerated had to visit them to provide sustenance. On psychological and interpersonal levels, John also relies on his community to connect him relationally to what is taking place in broader society. In doing so, the community helped counter the isolation and despair that could arise from incarceration. John needed his community to help him survive the multiple forms of imperial oppression he experienced, and they showed up for him. 

Are you the one? 

Despite John’s circumstances, he does not focus on himself, but instead focuses on Jesus. He needs to know if Jesus is the one they’ve waited for or if another is still to come. Is Jesus the one who will bring deliverance and new life in the midst of the violence and terror of the Roman occupation? 

There are two important points to glean from John’s question. First, John does not ask this question for himself. He uses the plural form of the verb meaning “to look or wait for” (prosdokomen). This indicates that he is just one person in a community of people waiting for Christ to come. Even in the most personally dire times, salvation is not an individual pursuit for John. Second, John recognizes that the work of liberation is a process. If Jesus is not the one they are awaiting, the community needs other strategies of resistance and resilience to survive until the Messiah arrives. 

John’s question—“Are you the one…?”—resonates in our present time. As ICE raids, detention centers, and mass deportations terrorize communities, many are asking: What is the good news for our times? How is God delivering God’s people in these fear-filled times? Such realities and questions invite us to consider how we, as communities of faith, can respond. How might we be present with those seeking the Messiah in the midst of incarceration, family separations, and uncertainty? Jesus’ response to John offers clues to how we might respond.

Actions speak louder than words

Jesus’ response to John is not a recounting of his identity as the Son of God. Nor is it a theological treatise about his beliefs. Instead, Jesus responds by naming his actions and the impacts they have on the community. Through Jesus, community members have gained sight, mobility, hearing, et cetera. These are not just cures to address physical ailments. They are opportunities for healing those who have been ostracized by society as they are reintegrated into the collective. Of particular note is Jesus’ final statement: “The poor have good news brought to them.” 

This phrase is often interpreted as sharing the gospel with the poor. The Greek reads, more literally, that the poor are gospelized. They don’t just receive good news. They experience it. This reflects the long list of actions Jesus has just named. Those most vulnerable in society—like John in prison—receive the gospel not only through words but through actions and community relationships. Caring for those who are most vulnerable, oppressed, and ostracized is a sign of living out the good news, just as Jesus did throughout his ministry. 

Jesus’ response is a call to action. Any who follow Jesus are called to embody the good news as Jesus did, sharing it through actions with those who are most vulnerable. More than offering words and platitudes, people of God are called to embody the good news. It is a call to care for and reintegrate those cast out or overlooked by communities: the forgotten in prisons and detention centers, shelters and hospitals. It asks us to consider how our actions answer the question “Are you the one…?” 

How can we better become the ones who embody the good news, challenging societal injustices? How do we empower our communities to collectively continue Jesus’ ministry, bringing about liberation and glimpsing the kin-dom of God? How are we the one?

The Old Testament reading for this third Sunday in Advent continues the book of Isaiah’s Edenic imagery. On the first Sunday in Advent, Isaiah 2 depicted the ideal world as one where the heavenly temple reconfigures the global political landscape. Isaiah 11, read during the second Sunday of Advent, used peace between natural enemies in the animal world to symbolize the rectitude of a world ruled by an ideal human leader. This week’s material from Isaiah 35 uses water imagery to represent the road to this perfect world, which still lies far off in the distance. 

Water was a precious commodity in the ancient world, especially in Judah, and still is today. Because the ancient audience relied primarily on an agriculturally based economy, the demand for fresh water loomed large. The creation story in Genesis 1 reflects this reality, when, in one of the first acts of creation, God separates salt water from fresh water so that plants, animals, and humans can survive. 

Israel had few sources of fresh water outside of rainfall coming in off the Mediterranean Sea. While the northern kingdom did have some fresh water sources, such as the Sea of Galilee, Judah in the south was more arid. In fact, the primary inland body of water, the Dead Sea, was saltier than the ocean. When people started settling in this relatively inhospitable environment, they spent most of their labor first building cisterns to catch as much rainfall as possible. The city of Jerusalem did have some springs around it, but the surrounding countryside, especially to the south, could not sustain the agricultural output needed for crops. 

This is why migratory groups, including the modern Bedouins, have survived by herding animals that needed less water, rather than settling into towns dependent on nearby produce.

Verses 1–3 and 6b–7 in this reading bathe the people’s fear of imminent death with images of healing waters, while the center of this first section (verses 4–6a) uses the language of physical disability to represent collective trauma. This imagery functions within their own cultural assumptions about the causes for physical deformity, creating stigmas for differently abled people that still exist today. So how do we read this text without reinforcing this way of thinking?

The poem clearly reflects the experience of a group that is in exile. This is evident in verses 8–10, where the imagery changes from that of water bubbling up in the desert to safe and traversable highways appearing in that same terrain. Why do these people need a road? (Or in our parlance, a car and a full tank of gas?) Because they are returning to their homeland after decades of living in servitude in a foreign land, brought there as war captives when their city walls were breached.

These verses are essential for understanding the imagery of the first half of the chapter. On the one hand, these images spring from the fate of literal bodies. The populations of captured cities were physically mutilated by the victorious armies. Some of the damage occurred on the battlefield, leaving combatants lame. Some, like King Zedekiah, had their eyes plucked out when they were captured. The sounds of the battlefield kept the survivors from singing God’s praises, as Psalm 137 attests, especially since the site of that singing, the temple, no longer stood.

On another level, though, the metaphoric function of people who are blind, deaf, lame, et cetera represents the personified city as a collective group. That city had been damaged—its temple, palace, and infrastructure destroyed to such a degree that it could not sustain this returning population. It metaphorically had lost its capacity to see, hear, conduct business, or even praise God. The city as a collective body had been deformed by the wars that ravaged it.

If the poem reflects the return of people to Jerusalem in the Persian period, it would have been written by the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those whose bodies bore the scars of war. But the poem gives witness to the reality of intergenerational trauma. These intervening generations who lived in exile grew up outside their ancestral homes, in lands where they did not have full rights of citizenship, leaving them vulnerable to those in power. The dream of being able to return to their homeland easily and safely felt like a fresh pool in the desert.

The poem ends at the exact geographic spot where the national trauma began: in the sacred precincts of Jerusalem. Although the reality of the repopulation of Jerusalem did not match the glory of this poetry, this author is not trying to write a historical account of return. In a verbal painting, the scribe attempts to represent how the ability to perform sacrifices in an ancient sacred space that had been defiled by their worst enemies felt to those who went there on the holy days. 

Archaeology has shown that the rebuilt Jerusalem was small and sparsely populated; the temple area was correspondingly meager compared to the descriptions of the first temple. But the fact that, once again, the people could sing songs to praise God in their own sacred space meant far more to their collective identity than the quality, urban setting, or size of the building. 

The imagery of the final verses captures this emotional impact. There is no need for lions to graze with young bovines here, because there are no lions—in other words, no enemies waiting to devour them (verse 9). Instead, the “redeemed” and “ransomed,” those who had been enslaved by their conquerors, have been freed to reclaim their identities as landowners in Judah and servants to God alone. As a result, the poet depicts Zion as a place for unending songs of praise, entered via a highway through the desert and fed by floods of fresh water.

The third Sunday in Advent has become the rare moment when Protestant churches pay a little attention to Mary, mother of God.¹

The candle lit this day is traditionally pink for Mary’s day. The texts from the gospel attend to Mary’s responsiveness to God and to her prayer magnifying God’s glory. Protestants have known who we are partly by being not-Catholic, so not attending to saints, to Mary, to pilgrimages and relics and the hierarchy. But Mary keeps creeping in the back door.

Mary is the first Christian—the first one to say “yes” to God’s cockamamie scheme to save the world through an unmarried Jewish teenager from the sticks. She is present at key points in Jesus’ ministry and even at his ascension and at Pentecost. She is a friend of the poor, mother of believers, the one who taught Jesus to pray and who teaches us. 

The salvation announced in Psalm 146:5–10 takes flesh in Mary’s womb. These psalm verses are almost a policy platform for the kingdom Jesus will inaugurate and to which the church bears witness. And it starts with a beatitude—just like Jesus’ preaching does in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5). Blessed, happy, glad, lucky, enviable is the one whose help is in the God of Jacob (Psalm 146:5).

Think of all the things our world finds blessed and enviable: those who are rich, good-looking, and close to power (see verse 3). The Bible reverses these beatitudes: No, blessed is the one who has no hope other than the Lord. There is no blessing in the Bible on physical attractiveness. None whatsoever on wealth—in fact, quite the reverse. The kings in the Bible are a rogues’ gallery—even the “good” ones are disasters. The only one who is happy is the one whose God is the Lord.

The subsequent verses describe who this God is by what he does: He executes justice, gives food, sets free, opens eyes, lifts up, loves, watches strangers, and upholds widows. If you look at God’s business card, it includes these jobs: establisher of orphans and benediction of the just.

There is a triumvirate of those drawing God’s special care and attention in Torah and so deserving the help of God’s people: the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. They are, as Robert Alter says, “exemplary instances of the vulnerable and the disenfranchised.”² Those who are the lowest receive God’s greatest attention.

The great preacher James Forbes often proclaims, “No one gets into heaven without a letter of recommendation from the poor.” Psalm 146 is God’s letter of recommendation for the powerless. Notice them. Help them. Make life with them. Become one of them.

Charles Spurgeon compares the clauses from verses 5–9 to stair steps up which God leads the poor by hand. By contrast, the wicked are thrown down in this psalm in a single swift motion (verse 9b). Good is fascinating and deserving of patient attention. Evil is boring.³

Psalm 146 is itself a stair step. It comes at the tail end of the entire set of 150 psalms. It begins with an admonition for one’s own soul to praise (verse 1). The last step has every creature under heaven and upon the earth giving praise, all things animate and inanimate, hallelujahing with a crashing crescendo (Psalm 150).

Psalm 146 is a sort of summary of the entire Bible, a “condensation of condensation,” one scholar calls it.⁴ If you want to know who God is, start with this psalm and work your way forward and back. We are tempted to trust in princes. We should not. We are tempted not to trust in the Lord, who loves and lifts the poor. We should. The whole is rooted in a theology of creation (verse 6). The God who made the sea and sky and all the other stuff is powerful enough to uplift the downtrodden. The one who made the eye can open it. The one who came among us as a stranger, who reaches out to widows and orphans, loves the righteous.

St. Augustine locates humanity, all of us descended from Adam and Eve, in the “bowed down” of verse 8. We are bent low. God takes on our flesh and stands us up straight with his resurrection.⁵ “The LORD will reign forever,” the psalmist insists in verse 10, and the Nicene Creed echoes. This is the whole of the Bible’s good news in nuce, with enough power to fuel the sun and the other stars.

This is a psalm with dust on it (Psalm 146:4). We are creatures with dust on us. In fact, we are creatures made from dust (Genesis 3). This can be good news. The princes we are tempted to trust are dust creatures too, like us, and will return to their origin, as we all will.

But the Lord delivers from the dust. Not only that—he became dust, one of us, and was laid in dust like the rest of us will be. The strange way the Lord of dust delivers the poor is to become dust like them and raise some of that dust—his own body. One day he will raise all of the dust we have become, to be part of his new heaven and earth that will reign forever. For now, we have only the promise of one bit of dust raised—his, at the right hand of the Father. One day we will need no promise to trust—we will have the fulfillment. This psalm is a promise. Count on it.

And it all starts with the word of one peasant girl in response to one angel. “Here am I,” she says, echoing her foremothers and -fathers through the centuries. “Let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). It is the prayer of every believer, the prayer of all creation, the prayer that the Lord of dust delights in and answers with a pregnancy, good news for the poor, and resurrection.

Notes

1. Commentary previously published on this website for December 15, 2019.
2. Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 503.
3. Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of David: Spurgeon’s Classic Work on the Psalms, ed. David O. Fuller (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1976), 675.
4. Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Eric Zenger, Psalms 3: A Commentary on Psalms 101–150, trans. Linda Maloney (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 609.
5. Expositions on the Psalms VI, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2004), 416.

The third Sunday of Advent is established for the joyous celebration of buzzing anticipation for the coming of the Lord. In light of James’ sobering call to “be patient” (5:7) regarding the “arrival of the Lord,” we are shaken from the seasonal complacency of sentimental nostalgia that gets proliferated by the cacophony of commercial sirens. And yet, we are confronted with the question of whether we will be ready for the coming of the Lord as Judge. 

How do we shift from dread to rejoicing? Too often, the coming of the Lord is associated with threats of punishment and hazards of being uncovered in our sinfulness. How do we move from viewing the return of the Lord as a prospect of God’s devastating exposure of our sinful habits, to a posture of anticipating God’s just judgment as a welcome and refreshing relief?

The interval of Advent can be an unsettling time. The clamoring and clattering of holiday duties often swallow us up in distractions of numb overcommitment. The stress of being stretched so exhaustingly thin can make for anxious self-awareness in the moments we allow ourselves to pause and acknowledge that “The Judge is standing at the doors” (5:9). In the feverish interlude between final year end-of-quarter and the growing pressures of New Year’s resolutions, we may find ourselves avoiding the tension that tugs at our imagination between the Lord’s arrival as a fragile infant in Bethlehem and the impending appearance of the Judge who sees all and knows all. 

The sobering wisdom of James for this hour is to orient our attentions and investments toward a future that God has promised to bring when he comes in judgment to set all things right. 

This is often a season of frenzied appointments, burdensome demands on our time and energy, and lists interrupted by both welcome and unwelcome surprises. During this time, we need to hear James’ reassuring reminder to “firmly set your hearts” (5:8; “strengthen your hearts” per New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition) so we can rest in the hope of the Lord’s approaching arrival. The term for this “coming” (5:7, 8) is parousia, which was often associated in the ancient world with the anticipated arrival of a royal or dignitary figure, which would have been accompanied by festal celebration and communal procession to mark the occasion.  

James reminds us that this season is not just looking back fondly to the heartwarming Nativity, but that it is even more a preparation for the heart-weighing Epiphany. 

James’ words invite us into the perspective of the poor and those who have been mistreated by the powerful and the policy-makers. From the beginning, James tips his hat to those who are among the “scattered” (in the diaspora, 1:1). Panning out to the wider section of this passage, we see that James has just upbraided the wealthy who have exploited their workers (5:4) and secured themselves in luxurious retreat (5:5). In contrast with those whom James now addresses as “brothers and sisters” (5:7), whom he encourages to “set firm their hearts” (5:8), these privileged prosperous have “(over-)fed their hearts for the day of slaughter” (5:5). 

The imagery here, with the eschatological frame of invested treasures for “the last days” (5:3), recalls the grotesque apocalyptic warning of Revelation 19: At the triumphant coming of the Lord, one is either invited to the feast (19:9) or destined to be the feast (19:17)! James warns these exploitative rich to “weep and wail” at their coming miseries (5:1), thus incentivizing those who would respond rightly to his message to join in solidarity with those who are eagerly anticipating the liberating approach of the Lord. This anticipation focuses on those who are unjustly accused, as well as on murdered victims who are vindicated in the Lord’s judgment (5:6). 

Adopting the perspective of James’ “poor” not only puts this season in perspective but reorients completely the kind of future we are living into with the coming of the Lord. 

After calling out the abusive rich people (5:1–6), James returns to his address of family (“brothers and sisters”) to invite solidarity in identity as the household of God (4:11; 5:7, 12). Here he begins with the exhortation to the family to be not just “patient” (as he will urge in verse 11), but “long-suffering.” It is here that James directs attention to look ahead to the coming of the Lord. 

But then he also guides us to look around. Focusing on our practice of speech, which is a common focus for James (see 1:19–26; 3:1–12; 4:11–12), he ensures that the waiting community will not turn on itself in “grumbling against one another” (5:9). This, as well, is motivated by a disposition toward not receiving condemnation when the Lord returns. It is also about reflecting God’s own character and so not collapsing into blame and complaints against one’s family. As such, this “establishing of the (communal) heart” is rooted in hope for the coming of the Lord.

James often notes that suffering is only temporary (1:2–4, 12), and this is paired with the insight that the rich and mighty thrive for only a fleeting moment. James’ patience is not simply grounded in personal grit nor even merely in the incentive that struggle makes for increased strength (“no pain, no gain”). Rather, James roots his call for patience in the future promise of the Lord’s coming, which will bring a reversal of fortunes, a righting of wrongs, and a vindication for those who remain faithful. Along with the everyday example of the persistent farmer, James makes his appeal with reference to scriptural paradigms: the prophets and the figure of Job. 

The turn from dread to rejoicing means continuing to gather together, orienting ourselves to the coming of the Righteous Judge, speaking encouragement to one another, and being nourished by the scriptural exemplars who point to the faithfulness of the coming Lord.