The Third Sunday of Advent
14 December 2025
Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let thy bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost, be honour and glory, world without end. Amen.
Isaiah 35:1-10
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11
Advent is the season of the coming of the Kingdom of God. We read and hear all about watching and waiting for its arrival. “Watchman, tell us of the night, what its signs of promise are,” we sang last week. But, are we ourselves watching and waiting for a time that is yet to come? Or are we practising watching and waiting for the celebration of the Incarnation that has already happened and transformed the world? The answer is yes. Advent demands we hold these two ideas in tension. Advent is the season of both what has already been, and that of what has not yet come. The Kingdom of God has been inaugurated in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, but it is not yet fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is showing us its signs all the time, yet those signs are but a promise of what is still to come.
Advent is the season of the coming of the Kingdom of God and it asks us to hone our senses, to be alert, to both see what God has already done and be ready to witness and, indeed, participate in the works of the kingdom that will be unfolding all around us. This is why the readings from Isaiah these past three weeks have been so important. They show us a vision of the Kingdom of God that goes back into Jewish antiquity; they show us a vision of the Kingdom of God that remains our hope and our expectation. Isaiah is teaching us both what to look for, and filling us with hope for the wonderful things that will be accomplished. .
Two Sundays ago, Isaiah showed us that in the face of all the uncertainty and chaos that surrounds us, that God will act, that “Lord shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” God’s intervention brings peace, and last Sunday we were given a fantastic vision of what this peace will look like: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” God’s peace inverts our expectations of earthly power, and creates a new paradigm. This week we hear Isaiah telling us of signs and wonders that will mark the Advent of God’s Kingdom: “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.” .
For Isaiah these works were in an age to come. They were a promise from God of future monumental change, a promise that was still ringing in the ears of the people of Judea some six or seven hundred years later when John the Baptist preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And he quoted Isaiah as he said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Mt. 3 cf. Is 40:3; 35:8). John saw the signs, signs of change, of the land reshaped, and after so much waiting, he set out to tell the people about the “one who is coming after me [who] is mightier than I [who] will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” .
He used language also reminiscent of the prophets speaking of God’s judgement against those who oppose the coming Kingdom. And, as we learn from Matthew, Jesus acknowledged John, received his baptism, and in that moment was recognised by God the Father as “my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.” .
In today’s Gospel Matthew tells us of another interaction between Jesus and John, one admittedly that is a little confusing from a narrative standpoint given what Matthew also reported to have happened at the baptism. Nevertheless, in response to John’s question about whether he is the one “who is to come,” the message Jesus sends is remarkable: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.” Jesus is answering John with news of Isaiah’s signs of the Day of the Lord: “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.” .
John the Baptist was attuned to the signs, knew the words of the prophets, and looked for the coming of the Kingdom of God. When he saw them he acted to ensure that others could see them, too. In Advent, we both look back to John the Baptist as the forerunner of Christ, the one who heralded his coming, the one who saw the signs, and announced the inauguration of the Kingdom of God. We also look ahead, with the Baptist as our model and guide. John was attuned to the nature of God. He understood the patterns in which God has acted, understood God’s ways, and so he studied the prophets and the scriptures, trained himself to look for the signs of God’s coming, God’s Advent into creation. We know that God’s work is not complete. We know that God will come again in a place and at a time we are not expecting. But we know he will come. He will come not just in the End, but be comes all the time, in little ways that both expand the reach of divine Love into the world and make our lives better in the here and now, and also tune us more and more to God’s ways for future seeing. .
The news of the world today is not great; to say the least. At the same time, was there really a moment when it was? Looking to the powers and principalities of this world to solve our problems and solve the systemic injustices that plague our world is a vain hope. It is only in and through God in Christ, whose Advent was and is to come, that the “waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water.” No human ruler working in their own self-interest can bring this inversion, and it is our vocation, then as Christians, as children of God, to cooperate with God in the project of his Kingdom. This means we watch, we wait, we keep alert. We are watching for those moments when God breaks in and we see the works of love-in-action. We are watching for those moments that call upon us to be agents of divine love and engage in the neighbour love that looks like all our visions of a kingdom in which the “lion lays down with the lamb” and the nations “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Be alert, then, for you do not know the day or the hour, for when our God
Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
Saint Lucy, 13 December 2025
© 2025 Andrew Charles Blume