Isaiah 11.1–10, Matthew 3.1–12
The Second Sunday of Advent, 7 December 2025 (not preached due to illness)
“A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.”
We know this passage of scripture very well, and it may feel simultaneously both familiar and strange to us. It seems to carry wonderful meanings we can only begin to imagine.
It comes from the old prophet Isaiah, who eyes saw what no-one else could: in a place of desolation, signs of new beginnings.
And it centres on a man called Jesse, who had lived a few generations before Isaiah. Jesse was David’s father, and Jesus was of the line of David, and that’s why Christians place such significance on this otherwise obscure passage.
Unlike his celebrated youngest son, Jesse is one of those people who isn’t much mentioned in the Bible, but who was one of those folks who we can imagine Jesus hearing stories about at bedtime: an ancestor, a forebear, Jesse passed on his ‘spiritual DNA’ to Jesus: it’s remarkable to think that this is the same ‘spiritual DNA’ which, in due course, he passed on to us. [1]
We may relate to Jesse in other ways too. Let it not be lost on us that Jesse was a farmer, a breeder of sheep, and a prominent resident of the town of Bethlehem: a man very much like people who we know, hard working, close to the land, involved and respected in the community.
A measure of how much the community respected Jesse is that their spiritual leader Samuel anointed Jesse’s youngest son David to succeed Saul as their leader. The people chose that shepherd boy as their king. Where before he had helped his father Jesse to raise his stock and work his land, David now turned his hand to raising armies to fight to possess the lands of his neighbours. Where once he had nurtured animals to feed the people, now he requisitioned animals to feed his troops. [2]
In Jesse’s time, when the people of Israel asked God’s prophet for a king to lead them just like all the other nations, Samuel had warned the people that having a king wouldn’t be good for them, and it wouldn’t end well. [3] And so it was that two centuries after David’s anointing, Isaiah was writing to the descendants of Jesse during hard times.
In 722BC Israel fell to the Assyrians, who forced Judah’s weak king Ahaz to become a vassal of their dreaded powerful pagan enemy. Assyria proclaimed that their god Ashur was supreme and declared that the conquered peoples had been abandoned by their gods. And so it seemed to the tribes of Israel, the descendants of Jesse, who were absolutely broken. Their kings had failed them. Their God had failed them. Their cities were laid waste. Like an axed-down tree stump they were cut low.
But in that moment along comes Isaiah with a remarkable vision – the vision of a shoot coming out from the axed-down tree stump of Jesse, the promise of a new branch which would grow out of his roots. The promise of one who would create an alternative community of peace in a wounded world.
Isaiah’s vision was remarkable for many reasons. He described a coming leader who, contrary to their occupying rulers, would “judge the poor with righteousness” and “decide with equity for the meek of the earth”. He described a community who rather than living in fearfulness and poverty, would “one day all live on God’s holy mountain without fear of hurt and destruction”.
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,” Isaiah writes, “the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them” – weird but wonderful images of a world where conflict has given way to concord. Images drawn from the natural world – where nature’s inherent goodness has bloomed into something even more wonderful than it already is.
The shoot from the stump, the branch growing from the roots: do we find these images relatable because they are drawn from nature? Ancient Judah’s ordinary people lived close to the land; Jesse was a farmer.
In Israel’s present circumstances Assyrian settlers imposed rents and taxes upon them and sequestrated their land, a process continuing from the moment when Jesse’s son David had turned his back on the family’s agrarian life to occupy himself with kingship and empire-building.
But within the people’s deep understanding of the natural way of things – of God’s natural way of things – lay their intuition that no amount of oppression or devastation could stop the green shoots of goodness seeking a way to re-emerge: slowly, almost imperceptibly, but indefatigably.
In a place of desolation, Isaiah saw signs of new beginnings. We recite his words each Advent to assert our own belief that a better world is possible, and comes wherever ordinary people embrace God’s natural ways.
Not for Isaiah John’s vision of a vengeful messiah coming to judge and destroy with fire – more on that next week – but for Isaiah the vision of a force which brings life out of the dormant earth, a shoot breaking through from a broken stump. Christians find this force in Jesus, of whom Paul writes, “all things have been created through him and for him… and in him all things hold together.” [4]
In our time, when farmers feel marginalised, and those seeking to live sustainably are often maligned, let us celebrate what we learn from Isaiah:
That Jesse was a farmer: and God’s good future rests with those who tend the earth with skill and care.
That Jesse was a shepherd: and God’s good future rests with those who nurture the creatures of the earth with love and respect.
That Jesse was active in his community: and God’s good future rests with those who choose to be good neighbours to the friends and strangers among us.
Notes
This talk draws on material from my earlier talk The Shoot from the Stump in the Advent of Trump, 4 December 2016, Sutton Montis, and my article The Shoot from the Stump – the weird energy of hope, Clapham Village Newsletter, December 2025.
[1] Thom M Shuman, The Jesse Tree. p.7,8.
[2] 1 Samuel 16.
[3] 1 Samuel 8.
[4] Colossians 1.15-17.
