1A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
2 The Spirit of the LORD will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of power,
the Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD -
3 and he will delight in the fear of the LORD.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;
4 but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
5 Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.
6 The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling [a] together;
and a little child will lead them.
7 The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8 The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,
and the young child put his hand into the viper's nest.
9 They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea.
10 In that day the Root of Jesse will stand as a banner for the peoples; the nations will rally to him, and his place of rest will be glorious.
--Isaiah 11.1-10
Fearful the sentence God will give
on the day of judgment.
In hope of the resurrection.
In hope of the resurrection
and of Christ’s mercy.
In hope of rising again and living for ever.
Let us be ready for the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come.
—Early Christian Prayer
"The final coming of Christ must strip away the masks and screens, the insulating layers of triviality and self-deception and the sheer opaqueness of sin which have shielded humankind from the radiant holiness of God. We shall have to undergo the searing experience of repentance and purification by love. That this will be terrifying we have good reason to believe, for exposure to love is no soft option, but the holy and glorious God who will then be manifested is the same God we have known all along the road of history in more hidden ways. He cannot contradict his earlier revelations of himself, and it is in those revelations that we have learned to recognize his glory. Power, majesty and light, certainly; but these are not the heart of the matter. His glory is self-sharing love, endlessly and recklessly poured out.
The final coming must, then, be sheer gift, like the first coming in the incarnation and the manifold comings in grace. The new creation will be alight with God’s glory, a glory vindicated as love: unmerited love where we are wholly bankrupt. The old creation is an ikon of the new, but the new is far more glorious, and it is born of forgiveness.
Characteristic of divine advents is healing. Israel’s Messiah is the Sun of Righteousness who rose with healing in his rays; he claimed the role of the anointed prophet who is sent to bind up the brokenhearted and proclaim liberty to captives; at his coming the eyes of the blind were opened and the arms of the deaf unstopped, the lame man leapt like a hart and the tongue of the dumb sang for joy. His secret presence in our own lives is a source of healing for the wounds that life has dealt us in the complicated situations where we hurt, maim and imprison one another by sin. This healing may take all our lifetime, but it is sure. The Last Judgment will necessarily be a divine healing operation on a colossal scale. Healing and judgment are already very close together in our own experience. Christ’s command in the Sermon on the Mount, ‘Do not judge’, is and injunction not to imprison or destroy one another by our condemning attitudes. God’s ‘judgment’ is not like that; it is a manifestation of his faithful love (condemnation is ’anger’ in biblical thinking). If we obey this command we shall be ‘perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect’, because when we long to forgive people we release them and heal, and this is what God is doing all the time. His ‘Last Judgment’ will surely be the same healing work on a universal scale: not all of us in the dock before a relentless judge, but all of us joyfully joining in the great enterprise of affirming, understanding, forgiving and releasing each other, and washing one another’s feet. The ‘anger’ side of judgment, the condemnation, can only be for anyone who refuses to join in the foot washing, the forgiving and the being forgiven.
At the heart of divine judgment, and manifested at last in the final judgment, will be unheard-of, undreamed-of mercy. In Advent the Church prays constantly in the words of a psalm, ‘Show us, O lord, your mercy’, and we should consider whether we are prepared to face the implication of such a prayer. It is not for some benevolent, accommodating softness that we are asking, but for the revelation of the very being and glory of God."
—Maria Boulding
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