Second Sunday of Advent: A Shoot from the Stump of Jesse
In the back of our church is our Jesse Tree, and as I mentioned last weekend, it’s one of the ways we reach out to those less fortunate than ourselves. Well today we hear where the idea of the Jesse tree comes from. God says, through the prophet Isaiah, “On that day, a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse”, referring to Jesse, the father of King David. In other words, from the family line of Jesse will come new life.
But as Isaiah was speaking, there was no sign of life in Jesse’s family line; the tree had been reduced to a stump. Anyone can see the difference between a tree, abound with foliage—spreading far and wide—versus a stump, a dead remnant of what once was. So what happened to the tree? As you likely know, after King David—there was a succession of kings, one generation after another, with few exceptions, each one worse than the one before. One after another, they were uprooting the tree that God had planted, killing the Jesse Tree.
As Isaiah was proclaiming the words we heard today, the one who sat enthroned on the stump was a king named Ahaz, who became king about 700 years before Jesus was born. He was as inept and morally corrupt as they come. For example, during his reign, his kingdom had two powerful enemies at the border, waiting to attack. Rather than reform and regain his relationship with God, as a way of ensuring peace, he turned to the Assyrians for protection. To foster alliance with them, he adopted their ways and worshiped their Gods, including the abominable practice of child sacrifice, even his own child.
To Isaiah, the promise once held for the line of Jesse had devolved into dead stump. But God wanted Isaiah to understand and to tell others that deep within that dead stump something was still alive: “A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom”. Isaiah continued by prophesying about what—or better, who—would emerge from that stump. Composer George Frideric Handel set that prophecy to music in his famous, Messiah: “The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD”. Those are, of course, the seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, which we received at Baptism and which were brought to fulfillment in being Confirmed: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.
And when this shoot emerges, Isaiah wants us to understand, all will be transformed: death will give way to life; darkness to light; and fear to love; fighting to peace. To emphasize this point, Isaiah declared that harmony will exist between predator and its prey: “the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid….the baby shall play by the cobra’s den….There shall be no harm or ruin on all my holy mountain….”
Isaiah wasn’t speaking only about things that oppose each other in nature. He was referring to that same dynamic as it exists in our hearts, conflicted within like predator and prey. The fallout of this conflict within is something akin to a dead stump. The beautiful plan that God had held in the line of Jesse, is not so different from what He had in mind when He made our hearts, however through sin, like one bad Judean king after another, our hearts can become lifeless.
Yet Advent, this season of hope, reminds us that God has not given up on us either, and deep within our hearts is a shoot waiting to emerge. The Graces we received in Baptism are still within, regardless of however we’ve rendered them dormant. As we say in this season, “Come Lord Jesus”, perhaps it can be understood as a ‘coming’ from within us, bursting forth like a fresh, green shoot.
Advent calls us to look to that promise within, in contrast to whatever out there that would seek to stifle what that green shoot brings. There’s so much that we experience on a given day and in our lives that kills that peace: pressures that come with our work; stress in trying to live up to expectations of others and to make them happy; stress that comes with the Christmas season; stress with finances; hostilities that we might experience as we’re just trying to get from one place to another.