Alleluia
Alleluia
Author: Brian J. Walsh, J. Richard Middleton & Mark Vander Vennen
Source: The Advent of Justice: A Book of Meditations (Dordt College Press, 1994)
Advent placement: 2025-12-15 (paired with [[15-chicken-cock-kentucky-straight-rye]])
Theme: On Isaiah 42 - creation sings because the weakest are protected; justice and the renewal of creation.
Verbatim source text
Reproduced from calendar/2025-12-15.qmd (Whisk(e)y Advent 2025).
Alleluia 1
He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth. Isaiah 42.4
Suddenly, now, in the first of four of Isaiah’s Servant Songs, the tone has changed. The shifting, careening plates of rock under our feet have fallen into place. The torturous labor appears finished. Resolution is coming! What a joyous, mature, supple, marvelous text! “Sing to the Lord a new song, his praise from the end of the earth! (v.10).”
Perhaps now, with these passages, we begin to catch a breathtaking glimpse of an answer to the question we raised at the beginning of this week: Why shouldn’t God just let the haughty and ruthless carry on? Given our unending failures, why shouldn’t chaos, violence, and death have their way? Today’s passages settle on an answer something like this: Because all that God has made is still good. It is worth saving. If the haughty and the ruthless were permitted to carry on, then they would undo God’s ongoing act of blessing humanity and all of life (Genesis 1:22; 8:22-9:1; Exodus 1:7). If the inattention, the magic, the sleep of our time and indeed of all the ages were permitted to gain the upper hand, they would bring chaos and ruin; they would dismantle God’s stunning handiwork. They would obstruct God’s desire to have the creation be the blessing that God intends it to be! This is why God chooses to humble the haughty and ruthless.
As citizens in pursuit of public justice, this too forms the source of our passion. God did not send his son into the cosmos to condemn it, but to save it through him. The world court exists for blessing, not for condemnation.
And so it is that all of creation from every corner bursts into exuberant song - from the sea and all that is in it, to the coastal lands and their inhabitants, the desert and its towns, the villages and their inhabitants, all the way to the tops of the mountains (v10-12)! Creation sings because the weakest have been protected: the eyes of the blind are open, the prisoners are released (v.7), the bruised reed miraculously survives, and the candle’s dying flame does not get blown out (v.3). In the economy of the Kingdom, the practice of justice and righteousness are intimately linked to the fertility and inhabitability of the creation. The creation is finally attuned to the ways of God.
In the end, all of God’s people will be led as if in a new exodus out of Assyria, Babylon, Rome; out of unjust, skewed family, economic, and political relationships; out of the dark shadows and into the light; out of the burning heat of all of this and into the cool shade of the trees. Then the song on everyone’s tongue will be: Alleluia! Advent, the coming of God to dwell among us: Alleluia!
Footnotes
Walsh, Brian J., J. Richard Middleton, and Mark Vander Vennen. The Advent of Justice: A Book of Meditations. Edited by Sylvia Keesmaat. Illustrated by Willem Hart. Sioux Center, Iowa. Dordt College Press, 1994.↩︎