Advent Calendar – 1 December 2025
Nativity Stories: Isaiah
I’m long dead. I had my time, heard the word, said my piece, and left the field. I didn’t just speak the truth, I lived it too, going about without a stitch for three long years, baking summer and chilly winter, as a sign of, well, it was important at the time. They might have locked me up. My wife bore a son, a sign of coming destruction, called The spoil speeds, the prey hastens. It was a mouthful calling him home for his supper: I wouldn’t have blamed him for shunning his parents. But what I saw grabbed people and didn’t let them go, they wrote it down, and even when others saw visions of how the world could be, they used my name. I am Isaiah and Isaiah and Isaiah. What I saw I saw. It’s up to others what they make of it.
After all, who didn’t see the shedding of blood when there should have been sharing of wine; the uttering of pieties and offering of luxuries, while so many were never given a chance, women without husbands, children without fathers blamed for their misfortune? It’s your fault you’re poor: heaven hated that old lie. And he didn’t hold back: I called them out and told them what they deserved – curse and suffering, ruin and desolation.
And yet, every time I viewed this judgment I heard something else, faint but persistent, a melody above the drums. There was always a promise. And I shared that too. He cannot forget his people any more than a woman forget her own child. When the land is baked dry under cruel heat, he will find water for the thirsty. When the people are banished from their home and squat in a foreign place and their only songs are laments, he will find a way home for them. When men think that fighting and killing will solve their differences, he will find a means for us to share this fragile earth, putting seeds into the ground instead of blood.
We cannot survive without hope. But there were times I glimpsed something singular, a vision of another son who would come long after I and my own children were dead and buried. I saw a young woman expecting a child to be called God-with-us. I beheld his family tree, a descendent of Jesse, the father of David. It seemed to me I witnessed his birth, and on his slender shoulders glorious names you’d think would belong to the temple of heaven, with seraphs and smoke. What a burden to be called Prince of Peace in our benighted world. But then I saw a world no longer benighted but benevolent, a child leading enemies to be reconciled, and predators letting their prey live and thrive. He would bring light to the unseeing, freedom to the trapped.
It took a long time to come, hundreds of years. People were wearied with the waiting. Prophecy does that: it sits and waits and then when the time is right, its truth cannot be hidden. Angels quote it, preachers teach it and people yearn for it to be real. And though I am done and dusted, my words have found new mouths and new ears, and more than that, new hearts to make their home. My words? Or expression from beyond me. I’m long dead, but remember, of all the things I saw and shared, I once said this, It was no messenger or angel but his presence that saved them.
Michelangelo, Isaiah, detail from the Sistine Chapel ceiling
Yours,
Donald
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain