the Second Sunday of Advent
Scripture Reading for Today:
Malachi 3:1-4
3 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty. 2 But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. 3 He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, 4 and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.
Baruch 5:1-9
5:1 Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, O Jerusalem, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. 5:2 Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God; put on your head the diadem of the glory of the Everlasting; 5:3 for God will show your splendor everywhere under heaven. 5:4 For God will give you evermore the name, "Righteous Peace, Godly Glory." 5:5 Arise, O Jerusalem, stand upon the height; look toward the east, and see your children gathered from west and east at the word of the Holy One, rejoicing that God has remembered them. 5:6 For they went out from you on foot, led away by their enemies; but God will bring them back to you, carried in glory, as on a royal throne. 5:7 For God has ordered that every high mountain and the everlasting hills be made low and the valleys filled up, to make level ground, so that Israel may walk safely in the glory of God. 5:8 The woods and every fragrant tree have shaded Israel at God's command. 5:9 For God will lead Israel with joy, in the light of his glory, with the mercy and righteousness that come from him.
Luke 1:68-79
68 “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come to his people and redeemed them. 69 He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David 70 (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), 71 salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us— 72 to show mercy to our ancestors and to remember his holy covenant, 73 the oath he swore to our father Abraham: 74 to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear 75 in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. 76 And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, 77 to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, 78 because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven 79 to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace.”
Philippians 1:3-11
3 I thank my God every time I remember you. 4 In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy 5 because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, 6 being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. 7 It is right for me to feel this way about all of you, since I have you in my heart and, whether I am in chains or defending and confirming the gospel, all of you share in God’s grace with me. 8 God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God.
Luke 3:1-6
3 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— 2 during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. 3 He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 4 As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. 5 Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. 6 And all people will see God’s salvation.’”
NIV
On Judgement
Ryan Turnbull lives in Winnipeg, MB and is a PhD candidate at the University of Birmingham. He teaches at Thorneloe University and is a postulant for ordination in the Diocese of Rupert's Land in the Anglican Church of Canada, attending St. Margaret's Anglican Church. Ryan’s podcast about Canadian political theology, True North Theology, launched in 2022 with the New Leaf Podcast Network. You can read more from him at his website RyanKTurnbull.com
Folks seem to have mixed opinions on memorizing scripture. For some, it just creates a fragmented view of the Bible that leads to the worst kind of proof-texting. For others, it is the practice necessary for indwelling the text such that interpretation becomes possible. Whichever is true, I happened to be formed in a strong Bible-memorizing community, but at best I only committed myself to that work halfheartedly. So I find myself left with fragments of verses from which to make sense of my faith and life. But, as Willie Jennings always observes, the work of theology is often no more than living among the fragments and trying to figure out how to go on (cf. After Whiteness)[1].
The fragments that sit with me this second Sunday in Advent come from Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” and 1 Cor. 6:3 “Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life!” These two fragments point us to one of the great questions of tension in the Christian moral life, ‘What are the ways of judgment?’
In the ancient Church, it was taught that the season of Advent was the fitting time for concentrated preaching on the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. As such, on this Second Sunday of Advent, we reflect on Judgment, specifically, the final Judgment. The Revised Common Lectionary lessons lean into this ancient theme of judgment with Malachi declaring the coming of the Day of the Lord, “Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?” The Church is right to ponder judgment in this anticipatory season of Advent, for the coming of the Lord is not just all mangers and angels; it is the arrival of the one whom the alternate Old Testament lesson from Baruch speaks, the Everlasting one who orders the mountains razed and the valleys raised.
The approaching judgment of the Divine arrival is a great and terrible moment, but it is not simply a cudgel to beat the fearful with. No, these texts are unanimous in their affirmation that this coming judgment is good news for Israel and good news for the world. But how can this be? Luke tells us, “...you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.” This, then, is the form of the judgment of the Divine coming; the proclamation of salvation by the forgiveness of sins.
But how is the forgiveness of sins the exercise of Divine judgment? Precisely because the forgiveness of sins carries with it a guilty sentence. The innocent do not require forgiveness, only the guilty. Forgiveness is the offense of the gospel. It is an incredible act of Divine power to at once proclaim a guilty sentence on the world and at the same time provide its means of salvation. This is a power that God alone can exercise, and has exercised in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The forgiveness of sins is properly God’s work because it is only God who can fully account for the demands of justice that such forgiveness entails. Who else can forgive offenders while ensuring justice for their victims? While it may be true that ‘all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God’ it is nevertheless also the case that the tragic outworking of the history of sin has left some of us more sinning than sinned against and others more sinned against than sinning. What human institution or exercise of power can sort out the competing demands of justice that the problem of sin has left our world mired in?
Thus it is God alone in the perfection of all holiness, power, and goodness, who has both the right and the ability to forgive sins. This is good news. For if God has the ability, nay, the prerogative to judge, then we have been freed from the anxiety that if we do not intervene, history will go awry. The Last Judgment of God is what ensures that history is more than a story written by an idiot. In God’s good Judgment, the life-denying works of evil come to naught and the alien righteousness of Christ is presented as our own. Covered in Christ’s blood, creation finds its answer to the prophet Malachi’s question of who may stand when the Lord appears.
The Last Judgment is a pastoral doctrine and an evangelical proclamation. But it is also a profound moral commitment. For the Christian to live in the time of the secular, this tension-ridden time before the end, is a gift we have been given wherein we exercise proximate judgments in the ongoing work of discerning the good owed to our neighbours without succumbing to the anxiety that we must set the world to right. We need not cry out with the crusader, “Deus Vult” while dispensing acts of retributive violence as a proximation of divine judgment, for this would be to prematurely cut history short. The Last Judgment will come at the end of all things, and so we are free to cultivate the moral patience necessary to live peaceably now. Because ultimate Judgment is the Lord’s, we are able to make the provisional judgments that make weeping with those who weep, and rejoicing with those who rejoice fitting responses to the somewhat absurd contingencies of history.
The exercise of Christian judgment can go forward with evangelical confidence precisely because the exercise of temporal judgment is provisional. This is where the fragments with which I began this piece come back into focus. The Last Judgment at once frees us from the burden of making ultimate judgments on the direction of history. For what could we do other than indict ourselves with that kind of judgment? Yet precisely because we have been set free from the burden of making history itself turn out alright, we are free to exercise proximate judgments amidst the matters of this world with confidence, as St. Paul reminds us. We live in the midst of tension, but we can live and act and make prudential judgments amidst this tension, secure in the knowledge that in the end, all will appear before the Judgment seat wherein the “tender mercy of God, the dawn from on high, will break upon us.”
Thank you for reading the New Leaf Advent Reader, a collection of reflections from writers across Canada. If you are enjoying the reader, sign up to receive the readings in your inbox each day here: SIGN UP
And please share this reflection with your friends and family who might also enjoy it.
