Lo, How a Rose
THE THIRD SUNDAY OF ADVENT
Isaiah 35:1-10 • James 5:7-10 • Matthew 11:2-11
Most evenings, my job as a US Forest Service intern involved making the rounds in a campground and inviting people to a campfire talk. Usually, the talk was about bears or mountain lions. As I approached one family’s campsite during dinner, I noticed they’d placed a makeshift vase of wildflowers on their picnic table. The most striking wildflower in bloom that time of year in the Sierra Nevadas was the leopard lily—with shades of bright red and orange and darker speckles, like a leopard.
The thing is . . . you’re not supposed to pick flowers in federally-managed forests. But at the time, I was more scared of trying to enforce Forest Service rules without back-up than I was of bears or mountain lions. Today, I’m better able to explain how plucking wildflowers deprives other visitors of a joy unlike many others I’ve known: the joy coming of across a smattering of leopard lilies in this nation’s wilder lands.
The prophet Isaiah knew the feeling of surprise and joy at encountering a blossom in the wilderness. “The wilderness . . . shall be glad,” we hear from Isaiah. “[T]he desert shall rejoice and blossom; / like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly . . .” What our translation calls a “crocus,” the King James Version calls a “rose.” Whether crocus or rose or lily, a flower in the wilderness is an image of divine goodness breaking into our world. The in-breaking of God’s kingdom looks like a small, delicate, beautiful opening in a landscape where a blossom is both out of place . . . and right at home.
Today, on the third Sunday of Advent, we traditionally light the rose-colored candle of our Advent wreath. Primed by the prophet Isaiah, we can see in that rose candle a sign of God’s tender care for a beautiful world. “The desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.”
That is the main job of prophets: to train us to see—to perceive God’s presence and action in the messy world of space and time. Our reading from Isaiah lists many signs that God’s plan to bring comfort, joy, and safety to God’s people is underway. Not only will the desert rejoice and blossom, but “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, / and the ears of the deaf unstopped.” The physically limited will jump, the speechless will sing, streams will erupt in the desert, and sparse grasslands will become swamps of reeds and bulrushes.
But Isaiah didn’t always get to do the fun part of his job, pointing out signs of hope. Years before Isaiah’s message in today’s reading, he received a different commission from God (Isaiah 6:9-10). “[B]lock [this people’s] ears,” the Lord instructed Isaiah, “seal its eyes”; “Make the heart of this people” dull, “obtuse” to the knowledge and desires of God (trans. Robert Alter). These instructions don’t seem to refer to literal deprivation of sensory organs. Instead, according to Isaiah, the Lord temporarily impaired people’s ability to perceive what God was up to and what God desired of them, because if they were able to “look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their” hearts and minds, then they’d know how to turn back to God, and how to be healed, and they’d be spared the devastation to come.
Of course, even biblical prophets don’t always have perfect vision. Perhaps this understanding of God as an obstructionist was Isaiah’s best explanation for why he couldn’t get through to people. God must be blocking their understanding. God must want them to feel the consequences of their resistance.
But no matter how clearly Isaiah did or didn’t understand why people rejected his insights for so long, this backstory helps us to see more clearly the good news in today’s prophetic message. The good news isn’t that a few people will regain their sight and hearing. The good news is that whatever impairments stood between human beings and their clearer perceptions of God have been removed.
Some of the signs from Isaiah’s good news also appear in today’s gospel. Instead of spelling out whether he’s the Messiah or not, Jesus tells the messengers of John the Baptist to report what they hear and see. Jesus invites them to trust their powers of apprehension. Some things Jesus points out match Isaiah’s list of signs that confirm God’s in-breaking reign: “the blind receive their sight,” “the deaf hear,” the physically limited walk, and the poor receive good news (Isa 61.1). But other signs listed by Jesus aren’t mentioned by Isaiah—the lepers healed and the dead raised—and one sign that is listed by Isaiah isn’t actually fulfilled. Isaiah says the Messiah will bring release to the prisoners, but John the Baptist is still stuck in prison.
Perhaps it’s not the signs themselves that clinch whether the reign of God is at hand. What confirms the presence of God’s in-breaking reign is the fact that people go looking for it.
With a hint of teasing, Jesus turns to the crowds and asks them what they were looking for when they went into the wilderness in the early days of John the Baptist. “What were you out there looking for?” he asks. “A reed shaken by the wind?” I can imagine the people laughing. Um, no. We didn’t run to the wilderness to take selfies in the desolate scenery. In fact, Jesus knows they weren’t looking for a reed, or for worldly comforts and security, but for a prophet, someone with insight, instructions for how to turn to God and be healed. They found what they were looking for: John the Baptist—the best prophet of all, according to Jesus.
Jesus knew that the crowds went to the wilderness to see something. The good news isn’t that their sensory organs were functioning, but that their capacities of perception were open to the kingdom and to the divine. That’s the best sign that the kingdom of God is at hand: that people are out there looking for it.
Now maybe it’s just my English-major mind reading too much into things, but I noticed that both Jesus and the prophet Isaiah mention reeds as something to watch for in the wilderness. For Isaiah, reeds in the wilderness are a sign: the healing reign of God is breaking into the world like a rose in the desert, like a reedy swamp where there once was dry wasteland. For Jesus, a lonely reed in the wilderness is sort of a joke—what people most definitely were not looking for when they went into the wilderness. They were in search of a prophet.
But in light of Isaiah’s words, even if all they found in the wilderness was a lonely reed, that too might have been a sign. Even a lonely reed would be a sign, a reminder, of the type of work God does, turning wastelands into wetlands, breaking into the world at unexpected times, in unexpected places. Perhaps the clearest sign of God’s reign is that we’re looking for it.
© 2022 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas