For shopping malls throughout our towns, the countdown to Christmas is well advanced. The high street measures the weeks before Christmas in things to be done: the money to be spent, the food and drink to be consumed, the debt to be incurred. For Christians Advent is a sacred season. It is a time to step back, to change attitudes, to bring hope to a world starved of hope.
Advent, like Isaiah’s vision of the Mountain of the Lord, is rooted in the world that we inhabit. Isaiah lived in a Jerusalem of moral collapse. The King and ruling classes had embarked on a cynical policy of self-aggrandisement at the expense of the poorer citizens. The city leaders were oblivious to the storm clouds gathering among the surrounding powers. Salvation, were it to come, would not come from Jerusalem’s bankrupt society. It would come only when the people as a whole raised their expectation to what God would bring about in their midst. The image of the Mountain of the Temple of the Lord, lifted higher than the surrounding hills, was but a figure for the inner journey that would raise despair to joyful expectation. At the beginning of Advent we are called to the same expectation.
