How we love to limit God
December 7, 2025 Today’s first reading and the Gospel reading speak of two prophets who came before Jesus , Isaiah and John the Baptist, who both pointed the Jews to the Messiah that God had promised them . The first reading from the book of Isaiah conveys quite a different image of the kind of God’s reign that this Messiah would inaugurate, different from what the Israelites had come to expect based on their experience from the time of Moses. That ‘Mosaic’ experience was one of a powerful Yahweh who smote their enemies in order to save them from those who oppressed them. Rather, this new reign of God would embrace the whole world, not just the Jews, and both the evil and the good would live in harmony together, for ’t he wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them ’’. In fact unlike their most famous King David, also God’s...
