WEEK ONE INTRODUCTION
DECEMBER 3–9
TITLE: THE CONTEXT OF CHRISTMAS
Christmas for many is “the most wonderful time of the year,” filled with some of the things that we cherish most: family, generations-old traditions, glorious music, and seemingly endless celebrations. For over two millennia, Christians have rejoiced in the advent of the Messiah, recalling his miraculous birth in a lowly manger. But what is the context of Christmas and how does that play into God’s story of redemption? How did the Old Testament prophets contribute to the grand narrative of the incarnation? 

At the beginning of Scripture, God chooses Israel to be his foreordained people so that through them he might bring salvation to the entire world. Yet, the reality of who the “people of God” were in Isaiah’s day was a far cry from the holiness Yahweh desired of them. It’s uncanny how the blatant sins and wickedness of eighth-century BCE culture seem to be so similar to our own lawless societies in the twenty-first century. Isaiah 5:20 epitomizes prevailing attitudes that were also present when the prophet wrote this warning three thousand years ago: “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” (Isaiah 5:20, NKJV).

When Isaiah was called by God, Israel was already split into two separate nations: the ten tribes in the North, Israel, and the two tribes in the South, Judah. They had been at odds with each other and the surrounding nations for over one hundred years. The first thirty-five chapters of Isaiah contain oracles of righteous judgment, first regarding Israel and Judah, then the surrounding nations, and finally the entire earth. Isaiah even looks into the distant future to foretell the Babylonian captivity and then the eventual fall of the Babylonian empire.  

We begin the 2023 Advent cycle by reflecting on the implacable words of Yahweh through his prophet Isaiah. The passages we have selected for this first week may be shocking to some—our modern sensibilities aren’t used to such harshness. But as we prepare once more for the already-and-yet-to-be arrival of Christ, it is important to thoroughly examine our individual lives to see what sin and evil lingers deep within. So, the context of Christmas is that God’s chosen people, who knew better, ended up “walking in darkness,” and following after the false gods of their enemies. Humankind was lost and needed help. Interspersed throughout Isaiah’s oracles of judgment are words of messianic hope and the possibility of a transformative redemption realized in the person of Christ. Astoundingly, God’s solution to the unspeakable wickedness in this world was to send his only Son in human form as a babe so that “the world might be saved through Him” (John 3:17 NASB).

TITLE: THE WICKEDNESS OF JUDAH 
Scripture #1: Isaiah 1:2–9 (NKJV)
Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth! For the Lord has spoken: “I have nourished and brought up children, And they have rebelled against Me; the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib; but Israel does not know, My people do not consider.” Alas, sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a brood of evildoers, children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, they have provoked to anger The Holy One of Israel, they have turned away backward. Why should you be stricken again? You will revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faints. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; they have not been closed or bound up, or soothed with ointment. Your country is desolate, Your cities are burned with fire; strangers devour your land in your presence; and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. So the daughter of Zion is left as a booth in a vineyard, as a hut in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city. Unless the Lord of hosts had left to us a very small remnant, we would have become like Sodom, we would have been made like Gomorrah. 
Scripture #2: Isaiah 1:21–23 (NKJV)
How the faithful city has become a harlot! It was full of justice; righteousness lodged in it, But now murderers.Your silver has become dross, your wine mixed with water. Your princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves; everyone loves bribes, and follows after rewards. They do not defend the fatherless, nor does the cause of the widow come before them. 
Scripture #3: Isaiah 1:27 (NKJV)
Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and her penitents with righteousness.

Poetry & Poet:
“The Last Wolf” 
by Mary TallMountain

The last wolf hurried toward me
through the ruined city
and I heard his baying echoes
down the steep smashed warrens
of Montgomery Street and past
the ruby-crowned highrises
left standing
their lighted elevators useless

Passing the flicking red and green
of traffic signals
baying his way eastward
in the mystery of his wild loping gait
closer the sounds in the deadly night
through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks
I hear his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came
floor by empty floor to the room
where I sat
in my narrow bed looking west, waiting
I heard him snuffle at the door and
I watched

He trotted across the floor
he laid his long gray muzzle
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow
his small dotted eyebrows quivered

Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.

THE WICKEDNESS OF JUDAH 
 
While we can take these devotions as individual exercises in piety, it is the corporate reality of life before God which stands out in our first readings from the prophet Isaiah. In fact, we should lean into the distinctively intersecting and co-operative venture of this Advent series to allow ourselves to be drawn out of our pious or prideful isolation. It is Judah and Zion (Jerusalem) that have failed. A people who have chosen unrighteousness and unfaithfulness––corporate failure, solidarity in sin, systemic and sustained, in communities of disdain. The forsaking of faithful covenant worship has led Judah into injustice (iniquity, evil and corruption, murder, greed, and neglect) (vv 4, 21-23) The body politic is diseased and decaying. A city on a hill has become a booth, a hut––a mere shed (v8). The emblematic names of Sodom and Gomorrah, disordered in their loves, condemned to divine judgment, are no longer distant by-words, but now shameful labels that apply to Daughter Zion (9). 
 
Artist Anselm Kiefer grew up playing in the rubble of post-World War II German cityscapes. His art for today, formally exploring the Norse mythology of the Great Hall of the Dead, Valhalla, does so through the motifs of urban destruction and tottering towers. The violence of the devastated landscape blooms upwards and outwards to the top of Böse Blumen. Poet Mary TallMountain also writes of a ruined city, seemingly inhabited by a sole survivor, finding feral friendship with the last wolf. The wolf slows his mysterious, wide-loping gait and his cries are reduced––from baying, to low whine, to snuffling at the door. He is rendered speechless, searching with eyes only in the face of desolation. The earth, represented by the wolf, has indeed, given ear (Is 1:2). It is the poet-prophet who can articulate knowing. But that knowing is not pretty. It is an account of culpability. Only the prophet-poet, the surviving remnant, knows ‘what they have done’ to bring this destruction upon the city.
 
Composer Stephen Anderson’s rendition of Isaiah 1, the first in his oratorio of the prophetic book, sounds out the distress and anguish of the divine judgment against Judah’s evil:

‘They have forsaken the Holy One,
Provoked the Holy One of Israel to anger,
They are gone backwards,
Gone backwards, gone backwards,
they are gone backwards,
Provoked the Holy One’

‘Zion shall be redeemed with justice, and her penitents with righteousness.’ (v27) What, or better, who, will that justice redeem, that righteousness, look like? Unlike Valhalla’s arbitrary reward for bloodshed in battle, Advent points us to a redeeming and restoring peace that will come by way of a faithful representative one, suffering the disease and death of his people, in incarnation and crucifixion.
 
As we enter into Advent, longing for the Lord’s coming, we are called to discern, with creation, our failure to worship holistically, in spirit and in truth. As stories of abuse of the most vulnerable, women, children, and marginalized others pile up around us, do we worship on a Sunday as if all is normal? While we decry cultural decline, do we see our sin, our interlinked ignorance, that happily disconnects our fate from our failings, as the occasion to repent, to cry out to God to continue to be the one who, by grace, preserves a remnant?  Are we open to see, as Judah was called to do, our own complicity with evil, such that the good news of God’s coming near in the Christmas story binds us up in our corporate representative Son of Man, Jesus himself?
 
Prayer:
Dear Father, Almighty and Everlasting God,
Come by your Holy Spirit to empower our judgment and discernment,
Show us the destruction of our sin, toward you, ourselves, and those you place around us,
Lead us in repentance to seek for the Kingdom of your coming Son,
And all his righteousness,
And have us yearn for peace,
In Jesus’s precious name,
Amen.
 
Dr. Andy Draycott
Associate Professor of Theology
Talbot School of Theology
Biola University

For more information about the artwork, music, and poetry selected for this day, we have provided resources under the “About” tab located next to the “Devotional” tab.