Second Sunday in Advent, Year A (2025) - Fr James Baxter, OP

The year 1971 saw the group The New Seekers release their hit “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)”. The song paints a lovely picture of a home for the whole world, furnished with love. In the garden are “apple trees and honeybees and snow-white turtle doves.” Everyone stands hand-in-hand, singing a song of peace that echoes through the hills and throughout the land.

The song would be easy to dismiss as a saccharine earworm that betrays its origins as a Coke jingle. But the vision is not too far from the prophecy of Isaiah that appears as our first reading this Second Sunday of Advent. What do we read about there? A wolf living with a lamb. A calf and a lion feeding together. A little boy looking after them. A cow making friends with a bear. No hurt or harm to speak of. Another lovely picture of a world in perfect harmony.

In its scriptural and liturgical context, though, it is clearly a serious prophecy corresponding to a serious human yearning. The reason why people sing and preach about a better world, whether in the canticles and prophecies of sacred scripture or in pop songs, is because of a deep instinct that the world isn’t as it could or should be. Yes, there is pain and disharmony all around us, but it could be otherwise. In a shorthand summary of original sin, “Something went wrong.” More importantly, the scriptural revelation affirms that this instinct of ours is correct, that it is the will of God that all harmony should be restored, and this restoration will be realised in the kingdom of God that Jesus inaugurated.

This is a real hope, and as we read Isaiah’s prophecy more fully, we see that there is nothing fantastic about it, and certainly nothing sentimental. The perfect harmony that Isaiah envisages only comes after the advent of the “shoot from the stock of Jesse”, the messiah on whom the spirit of the Lord rests. His advent at first brings confrontation rather than harmony: “His word is a rod that strikes the ruthless, his sentences bring death to the wicked.” The idyllic imagery of animals becoming friends only comes after stern promises of judgement.

Surely it has to be that way. How can God bring about perfect justice, and the peace that accompanies it, without judgement? That is how Isaiah sees it, and as John the Baptist prepares the way for the messiah, there is an Isaian echo in his own warnings of judgement. We might have expected that when the Pharisees and Sadducees approach him to receive his baptism of repentance, he would welcome them with a greeting. To be sure, he acknowledges their presence. “Brood of vipers”, he calls them. This greeting (of sorts) is loaded with the accusation that they are treacherous and malicious, bearing spiritual venom. It’s a confronting phrase, and the rest of his words to them continue in this vein, as he gives them a vivid warning of the appro

aching judgement: the axe is laid to the roots, the chaff will be burned in the fire.

What can get overlooked in the warnings, however, is how John gives the Pharisees and Sadducees the opportunity to make this judgement for themselves: “If you are repentant, produce the appropriate fruit.” Repentance presumes a moral judgement on oneself, before turning to God in sorrow. “If we judged ourselves truly, we should not be judged”, says St Paul (1 Cor 11:31). St Francis de Sales offers a similar meditation in his Introduction to the Devout Life: “Surely I will judge myself now, that I be not judged.” The “if” that John offers the Pharisees and Sadducees allows for the possibility that they have engaged in moral reflection, and are willing to prepare for the kingdom of God with the seriousness that it asks of them. John is not just throwing warnings in their faces, but with along with the warnings he invites then to join him in another way, the way that he is preparing for the advent of Christ.

What John asks of them is what is asked of each of us during this season—preparation, both spiritual and moral, personal and collective, for the advent of Christ. It is a time for serious reflection on uncomfortable topics: sin, our mortality, the end of the world, our need for repentance. Uncomfortable it may be, but it is well worth it, so that we experience a greater harmony with ourselves, with creation, with each other and with God—a harmony that will be perfectly ours in the kingdom of God.

Fr James Baxter, OP is the Parish Priest of Broadway, Glebe, and Pyrmont, New South Wales.