In our readings for Advent today Second Isaiah calls out to exiles in Babylon to come home. “Look, God your shepherd is coming, in his arms “he holding the lambs, carrying them in his bosom, leading the ewes with care.” The gospel tells us Jesus is the shepherd who comes  leading the flock and holding in his arms the sheep that have strayed. Our Old Testament readings. especially in its first weeks, are taken from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. The gospel readings these first weeks are chosen particularly to amplify  the meaning of  Isaiah. We see that in today’s readings.

Our responsorial psalm amplifies that further:  God the powerful shepherd is coming, not only leading Jewish exiles, but all nations in exile. God brings about a universal salvation. So “Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice; let the sea and what fills it resound; let the plains be joyful and all that is in them! Then let all the trees of the forest rejoice.”

We’re reading from Second Isaiah all this week. Scholars say that readings from the 40th chapter of Isaiah on come, not from Isaiah the priest who spoke in Jerusalem about the year 587 when Assyrian armies destroyed Jerusalem, but from an unknown prophet speaking in Babylon to Jewish exiles about 60 years later, urging them to return to Jerusalem. Perhaps he uses Isaiah’s name and language to avoid trouble with Babylonian’s leaders for suggesting such a thing .

Historians say that not many Jews returned to Jerusalem at his call. Some did, but others were not interested in the prophet’s invitation. They had become acculturated; Babylon’s now their home. They have families and jobs there; Jerusalem is far away and its future uncertain. 

They’re the stray sheep Second Isaiah addresses. Like Jesus  he’s searching for the strays.  

We need to study Judaism more fully as a template for our own church today, Walter Brueggemann, the Lutheran Old Testament scholar says, especially the mystery of Exile. 

“The metaphor of exile may be useful to American Christians as a way of understanding the social context of the church in American culture. The exile of the contemporary American church is that we are bombarded by definitions of reality that are fundamentally alien to the gospel, definitions that come from the military-industrial-scientific empire which may be characterized as ‘consumer capitalism.’” (Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile, Fortress Press 1987) 

At the time of Second Isaiah the Jews were singing the songs of Babylon, not the songs of Zion. What songs are we singing? The Good Shepherd still goes in search of his strays.

Here’s Handel’s beautiful remembrance: