A Better Governance

November 27
First Sunday in Advent

Psalm 122, Isaiah 2:1-5, Romans 13:8-14, Matthew 24:36-44

Advent is a time when our better yearnings have a say with us, when we ponder receiving the promises that God has yet to give. And we even consider turning loose what has become old, fatigued, and lifeless.

A central metaphor for Christians is governance. So we sing about Jesus as "king," that heaven and nature may sing. Advent is a time to consider a better governance, to weigh what it would cost, what we must relinquish, how we would receive a new governor.

The images for a better governance come from the Old Testament and focus on Jerusalem. Jerusalem, then as now, may have been a conflicted, disputed, troublesome place. But it is also a powerful symbol of what is good and whole. So Psalm 122 contemplates a pilgrimage of believers to that city. It is a journey we are invited to imagine, to the city of real holiness, new regime, fresh king. The substance of the new order is "peace and prosperity," "peace and security," "peace," and "good" (verses 6-9).

In Isaiah 2:1-5, the vision is enlarged. Now it is a pilgrimage of all nations to the city. The journey is to embrace Torah (verse 3), to practice justice and equity. And the result will be an ordered society marked by disarmament and well-being (verse 4)—no more war, no more policies of greed, exploitation, and rapaciousness.

The Jerusalem image of a human order is a powerful one. In Advent, we enter it again as we consider this Son of David. And the vision makes us newly aware of how shabbily we have ordered life, how narrow the range of our humanity, how contrived are our peace hopes through schemes of war. Our hopes out of the Jerusalem vision judge our present commitments to which we have so easily succumbed.

The New Testament story about Jesus is uneasy with Davidic Jerusalem hopes. In both the Gospel reading and the epistle, we are offered a more radical, more disjunctive metaphor—"the Son of Man" coming in "full time." This is not the expected procession of the Jerusalem king. This is the shattering, unexpected one from "the other side" underived, who makes all things new.

The image in the New Testament readings is sharply discontinuous from that of the Old Testament. The Old Testament staked our hopes on Jerusalem. But the New Testament fulfillments run well beyond those hopes to assert that the new governance soon to be given us will be stunningly unlike what we have known and hoped for.

In Advent we are left to consider such a radical break, to see if we are prepared for such a newness. It is the Bible's effort to break our imagination, to have us move beyond all known worlds, to think a genuinely new thought, to dream of a genuinely new world which will displace the old failed one.

We are invited not only to dream, of course, important as that is. So Romans 13:8-10 enjoins a new act. It first asserts commandments (the second tablet of the Torah) on human relations. Then it offers a radical summary: love your neighbor. In the new governance, that will be expected and required, with energy given to match the expectation.

How simple! Love of neighbor is a way to the peace envisioned in Psalm 122. Love of neighbor is the substance of the Torah for which the nations wait in Isaiah 2. Love of neighbor becomes the program of the new governance of the Messiah. Such an obvious, uncomplicated ethic, yet so at odds with all the old ways of governance to which we are committed, and in which we are deeply enmeshed.

One must not oversimplify biblical hopes. But one also must not make them excessively complicated. The new governance, hoped for as the son of David, is given us as the intrusive "Son of Man." And that is warrant for a quite new citizenship.

In his famous Romans 13, Paul has admonished obedience to authority. But the argument is about a new authority for a new obedience for a new community. It is a pertinent question in our time when all the old authorities seem overly committed to the crushing of love and the banishment of the neighbor from purview.

The text carries us into dreamed-of Jerusalem. But it carries us right on through Jerusalem to marginal Bethlehem, where the uncredentialed one confounds the rulers of this age, contradicts old ethics, and shatters old politics. The "fleshly desires" are now to be displaced (Romans 13:14). We could be led to genuine peace. Such texts in such a season invite us to reconsider the question of governance.

December 4
Second Sunday in Advent

Psalm 72, Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12

Advent, our season of expectation, makes no sense unless there are promises spoken by God which impinge upon our life. For Advent, therefore, we may set ourselves two agendas: to clarify the promises of God that have been spoken over us; and to decide if we dare to look at those promises seriously. If we cannot locate the promises, or if we do not trust the promises, then Advent is an empty, silly gesture.

In the epistle reading, Paul writes of God's truthfulness, by which he means reliability. God does what God says, that is, keeps God's word. This same God is described as the "God of hope", (verse 13). God's truth is about God's resolve to transform our world, to make it utterly new. That is why Gentiles may rejoice, praise, and hope (verses 9-12). And we believers, out of that promise, are invited to joy, peace, and power (verse 13).

So we ask, what is the promise? As the lectionary is arranged, we are bound to say the governing promise is the coming of a new leader, of the line of David. Both Psalm 72 and Isaiah 11 articulate a new leader who will be empowered by the Spirit (Isaiah 11:2), who will have great dominion and much prosperity (Psalm 72: 8-11, 16). The common element in these two poetic forays is that the new governor will attend to the well-being, equity, and worth of the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised: "May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the needy and crush the oppressor" (Psalm 72:4). Also, "With righteousness he will judge the poor, and decide with equity for the poor of the earth" (Isaiah 11:4).

The poet turns to other images for the restoration of the whole estranged world, including the animals. But the pivotal point is the transformed situation of the poor. That is what the coming governor will do.

Note that the promise is not social evolution or developmental improvement. It is rather the inversion of the present in which the devalued will become the properly valued. So the promise is, at the same time, an enormous hope and a heavy judgment on how things now are. The function of the promise is to make the present provisional and tentative, even while we tend to make it absolute and treat it as an eternal arrangement.

In Matthew 3:1-12 the promised sovereign now draws near in the words of John the Baptist. Matthew uses the language of Isaiah 40:3 to envision a homecoming of the new king in triumphant procession. John calls for repentance (verse 2), which means ending old loyalties for the embrace of the new regime.

Jesus did indeed come to do exactly what Psalm 72 and Isaiah 11 had promised. He came to cause inversion, to displace the old marginalizing arrangement. He summoned people to abandon the old patterns for God's new truthfulness.

It does not surprise us that John has conflict with the ones who value the present arrangement (verse 7). The establishment figures do not understand that this coming of the new king means the end of privilege and priority. They trivialize the baptism of Advent as a religious act without realizing that it means the end of the known world.

And so John disputes with them, urging that their pedigrees of status, conviction, and influence are of no use, because all these belong to the old age now placed in deep jeopardy. The lesson ends in verse 12 with images of harsh judgment on those who hold too intensely to old power arrangements that do not grant access to the poor and marginal. They do not know it yet, but the worldview of the Pharisees and Sadducees is in fact deeply resistant to the coming of this new ruler.

Advent is for pondering the promise. And so it is a time for joy. But Advent is also a time for sober inventory, to face how deeply enmeshed in and committed to the old regime we are. Many of us benefit from the marginality of the poor, and we do not want it to change. In the real commitments of our lives, we are deeply in conflict with the new reign. And we are without hope, meaning we do not want, expect, or welcome the new leader. In our moments of honesty, we crave our hopelessness because it lets us keep things as they are.

But the new sovereign comes on the wind—by the Spirit (Isaiah 11:2, Matthew 3:11, Romans 15:13). That means he cannot be stopped and will not be resisted. The Spirit works through us, among us, and even against us. The Spirit in these days would indeed work against our hopelessness to let us hope.

Perhaps then, even we could welcome the new governor, for the promises to be actualized supersede our old privileges. That's the truth about it, and the truth could drive us to despair, or let us hope, in joy, peace, and power. We might become as celebrative as outsiders (Gentiles) instead of resistant insiders with too much to guard. The same truth which undoes us is the truth which permits hope.

Walter Brueggemann was a professor of Old Testament and academic dean at Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, Missouri when this article appeared. He is a Sojourners contributing editor.