Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
7th of December 2025
Isaiah 11:1-10
Matthew 3:1-12
Today, the second Sunday of Advent, is Peace Sunday, so naturally I have spent this week thinking about peace, and particularly about the peace most of us enjoy living in Australia. In the most recent copy of The Monthly, author Don Watson has a long article about the part of Victoria in which Dezi Freeman killed two police officers, and particularly about the ‘chronic disgruntlement’ of some of its residents. Watson writes:
A cafe owner in the King Valley says it has always puzzled him. If you were born just after the war in Europe, as he was, and you grew up in a social democracy, and you migrated to another social democracy in Australia, and now live amid such natural beauty, how can you not see that you and your generation are just about the luckiest people in history? He jollifies a tableful of locals come to celebrate a birthday, presents them with a birthday cake and, when they’ve finished singing Happy Birthday, he tells me that so many hereabouts complain as if they were living through a famine, a war or a dictatorship.[1]
I read that and thought, ‘Yeah!’ I was born one generation later than that café owner, and I did not migrate here, but I do know that I am one of ‘the luckiest people in history’. In a world of famines, wars, and dictatorships, most Australians live with peace and plenty.
But then on Wednesday I attended the annual ‘Holding the Light’ service at Wesley Uniting Church, which commemorated the 74 Australian women who have been killed since the last service was held in November 2024. Each of the names of the murdered women was read out, together with their ages and the states in which they lived. The oldest woman killed was 88; the youngest was seventeen. What I found most moving were the women, six from Western Australia, four from the Northern Territory, two from Queensland and one from Victoria, who were remembered as ‘unnamed’ because they were First Nations women whose names are not said after death. Thirteen women out of 74; eighteen per cent of violent deaths when First Nations people make up less than four per cent of the Australian population. I was reminded that not all Australians can be described as ‘the luckiest people in history,’ and that one of the reasons I live without fear is my race.
Celebrating the Second Sunday of Advent as the Sunday of Peace does not mean closing our eyes to the world’s continuing violence. After all, in today’s reading from the Gospel according to Matthew we have John the Baptizer preparing the way for the Lord by describing the coming of the kingdom of heaven as the coming of a judgement that will vindicate the righteous and condemn the unrighteous: ‘His winnowing-fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing-floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.’ The peace of which the prophets from Isaiah to John the Baptist write is the peace that comes when justice is done, and those who have been oppressed or mistreated are vindicated. It is not a peace that ignores violence, not simply the Pax Romana of which the Roman historian Tacitus says, ‘where they make a desert, they call it peace’. It is a peace that overturns violence, so that natural enemies can lie down together, even the most vulnerable of humanity, children, will be safe, and ‘[t]hey will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’.
Isaiah was prophesying and Matthew was writing in times of violence, when the Holy Land was torn by the actions of empires, although the empires under which each of them lived were different. In both their times, some people wanted to challenge the violence of the empires with yet more violence. Neither Isaiah nor Matthew advocates this. In the prophecy that we hear from him today, Isaiah takes images commonly used of kings but reinterprets them to suit a ruler who will be called the ‘Prince of Peace’. (Isaiah 9:6) The Messiah is given spiritual gifts not to enable him to impose his will on other people, but to enable him to deliver justice. Unlike human judges, the Messiah will not be tempted to make judgements based on what people look like or how they present themselves, and so he will be able to give judgement for the poor and meek rather than favouring the rich and strong. When Isaiah describes the one on whom the Spirit of the Lord rests killing the wicked, he does not put a sword in his hand or imagine him commanding an army. Instead, Isaiah prophesies: ‘he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked’. It is because of the righteousness of his judgements that ‘the nations shall inquire of him,’ not because he has conquered them.
No more than Isaiah does Matthew ignore the violence of his times. Matthew was writing for a community that had lived through the final defeat of Jerusalem by Rome and the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, and it is in Matthew’s version of the Nativity that we read of the violence of ‘King’ Herod and the massacre of the baby boys of Bethlehem. (Matthew 2:1-18) Today’s message of John the Baptizer sounds terrifying and destructive, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance … Even now the axe is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire’. But despite the historical context and despite the aggression of John’s words, the Messiah Matthew describes in his version of the Gospel, the Messiah for whom John the Baptizer is preparing, is still Isaiah’s Prince of Peace. He is the one who tells his disciples: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God’ (Matthew 5:9) and ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven’. (Matthew 5:44) This is the one for whose coming Advent is preparing us. When we celebrate this Sunday as Peace Sunday, we are committing ourselves to being peacemakers in a world of violence, to loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us.
My Advent reading this year is a book by theologian Kelley Nikondeha titled The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope (2022). In it, she writes about Nafez Assaily, a Palestinian peace activist born in the West Bank. In 1983 Assaily heard a talk given by Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian Christian, the ‘Gandhi of Palestine’ and founder of the Palestinian Centre for the Study of Nonviolence. The talk encouraged Assaily to believe that non-violent action was the answer to the Palestinian situation, and he began to work for Awad. When Awad was expelled from Israel in 1988, Assaily became the Centre’s acting director.
In 1986, in collaboration with the Centre, Assaily developed a mobile book-loan service called the ‘Library on Wheels for Nonviolence and Peace’ in Hebron. Where the terrain did not allow the Mobile Library to pass, the Library on Wheels became the library on a donkey to reach homes in the hills. One estimate says that the library has reached about 50,000 people over two decades. In her book, Nikondeha writes of another project of Assaily’s: a collection of books provided for Palestinian bus travellers held up for hours at Israeli checkpoints. The books were about non-violence; they were also subversive, showing the Israelis that Palestinians at checkpoints were making good use of their time. Nikondeha says that Assaily has found that people learn non-violence best in the context of their own lives, learning how to manage family and work life without resorting to violence before slowly embodying a nonviolent approach to living under occupation in Palestine. [2]
Sliman Mansour – Flight into Egypt
In The First Advent in Palestine, Kelley Nikondeha writes that, ‘Advent calls us to wrestle honestly with this truth: troubles don’t disappear just because Jesus arrived. The world is still harsh and riddled with injustice.’[3] This is something of which we are especially reminded in the liturgical Year of Matthew, since his telling of the Nativity concludes with refugees, infanticide, and a quote from the prophet Jeremiah: ‘A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’ (Matthew 2:18) Advent calls us to work for peace in a world of war, knowing that being peacemakers takes hard work and that ultimately Jesus, Emmanuel, the Prince of Peace, was murdered by the Roman Empire. But if people like Nafez Assaily and Mubarak Awad can work for peace in Palestine, then surely we, being in Don Watson’s words ‘the luckiest people in history,’ can also work for peace, in our families, our workplaces, our nation, and the world. After all, it is by working for peace that we participate in the kingdom of heaven that Jesus’ birth inaugurates and that we celebrate at Christmas.
[1] Don Watson, ‘North by North-East’, The Monthly (Dec 2025-Jan 2026), p. 28.
[2] Kelley Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine: Reversals, Resistance, and the Ongoing Complexity of Hope (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books, 2022), pp. 154-157.
[3] Nikondeha, The First Advent in Palestine, p. 147.
Rev Doc Geek 