• Somebody Cut It Down First
• Seven Things Rest on Him, and Not One of Them Is the Test
• The Question That Goes Unanswered
• Who the Measurement Belongs To
• What This Is Not Saying
• The Round
• Whence Is This to Me

Somebody Cut It Down First

Isaias does not begin with a tree. He begins with a stump. A rod comes out of the root of Jesse, and the only reason a root is the thing being talked about is that the trunk is gone. Somebody felled it. The house of David, which was supposed to be a dynasty, is a cut surface at ankle height in a field, and the prophet is standing in front of it telling people that the green thing they are waiting for is going to come up out of exactly that.

Hold that beside the question Elizabeth asks, because they are the same question from two ends. Whence is this to me is what you say when the arrival does not match the address. A shoot on a stump does not match the stump. A visit from the mother of my Lord does not match a house in the hill country belonging to a country priest and his elderly wife. Both texts put something live at a place that had, by any ordinary reckoning, stopped being the sort of place things happen.

And here is what the liturgy does with that, on a fast day, in violet, with no Alleluia: it does not explain it. Isaias never tells you why the stump. Elizabeth never gets an answer to whence is this to me. The Mass prints the question and moves straight on to the next thing she says, and then to what Mary says, and the sentence is left standing there open in the middle of the page like a door somebody forgot to shut. Whence is this to me, and then nothing.

I have come to think that is deliberate, and that it is a mercy. Because the moment somebody answers whence is this to me, the answer becomes a qualification, and the qualification becomes a bar, and the bar is what half the people reading this have spent their lives failing to clear. Leave whence is this to me open and there is no bar at all. Close it and you have just built one.

Seven Things Rest on Him, and Not One of Them Is the Test

Go back to the Epistle and count what Isaias puts on the coming one: the spirit of wisdom, of understanding, of counsel, of fortitude, of knowledge, of godliness. Then, separately, he shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord.

Seven endowments, and every single one of them is interior. You could not have gone up to this man in a market and checked any of them. Whence is this to me could not be answered off that list even by him.

Then comes the turn, and it is the most important sentence in the reading. But he shall judge the poor with justice, and shall reprove with equity for the meek of the earth. Isaias has just spent two verses describing an inside, and now he tells you where to look to find out whether it is true, and it is not the inside. It is a courtroom. It is what happens to a class of people who cannot pay for a hearing.

That is a strange way to write about a Messiah, and it is worth being struck by it. The test is not administered to him. It is administered to the outcome, in somebody else’s life, and he does not get to grade it. Whence is this to me, asked by any one of us, cannot be answered by an inventory of our own furniture, because Isaias has just refused to let the inventory count even for the one person in scripture entitled to it. Whence is this to me is answered outward or it is not answered.

Look at the grammar of that clause too, since it is doing quiet work. He reproves with equity for the meek of the earth. The Latin is pro mansuetis terrae, on their behalf.

The meek in this sentence are not being given an instruction. They are not told to be meeker, or to wait better, or to be patient with the court. They are the party the judgment is being done for, and in the whole pericope they never once receive a command. Whence is this to me, on their lips, is not impertinence.

I want to say that plainly because of how this passage usually gets used. Meekness gets preached at the people at the bottom as a virtue they owe the arrangement. Isaias does not do that here. He aims the entire sentence at the bench. Whence is this to me is a question for the bench to answer, and not for the ones standing in the dock.

Whence is this to me. Ask it of the shoot on the stump and Isaias gives no genealogy of merit. Ask it of the hearing the poor finally get and there is no suggestion they earned it by conducting themselves well while waiting. The thing arrives, and where it arrives is the proof, and the people it arrives to are not asked to account for themselves first. Whence is this to me, twice over, and twice no bill follows.

The Question That Goes Unanswered

Luke’s in those days picks the story up the moment the angel has gone, and the archive has been in this chapter twice already this month, at the Immaculate Conception and again on Wednesday. Today it walks four days into the hills.

Now Elizabeth. She is filled with the Holy Ghost, the text says so directly, and it is the same shape as Isaias: an interior endowment, stated flatly. And the very first thing that endowment produces is not a statement about Elizabeth.

She cries out with a loud voice and every word of it is about somebody else. Blessed art thou. Blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me.

Count the subjects of her sentences. Thou, thou, the fruit of thy womb, the mother of my Lord, the voice of thy salutation. She is filled with something and it comes out pointed away from her. Whence is this to me is the only clause in her whole speech with me in it, and even that one is not a claim, it is a question about an origin. Whence is this to me, and then straight back out to the person standing at her door.

This is why I think the unanswered question is the point rather than a gap. Elizabeth is not being modest. She is not performing the little curtsey of unworthiness we are all trained in, where you say you do not deserve a thing in a tone that makes clear you rather think you do. She asks a real question about where an arrival came from, and then she gets on with saying true things about the person in front of her. Whence is this to me is a real question and she treats it as one.

We looked at a very near thing to this yesterday, and the difference matters enough to say out loud. Thursday’s offering was about whether a person’s own felt state is admissible as evidence about where they stand, and the answer there was that it is not the instrument, in either direction. Today is not about that at all. Today is not asking what you can find out about yourself. It is asking what would even count as an answer to whence is this to me, and Isaias has already settled it: the answer is a destination, not a description.

There is another near thing two days back. On the Ember Wednesday the argument was about whether a person is permitted to ask a plain question about their own situation at all. Today the asking is not in question. Elizabeth asks freely and is not corrected, and today’s whole interest is in what the answer is measured by rather than in whether the asking was allowed. Whence is this to me goes unanswered here and costs her nothing.

Who the Measurement Belongs To

I want to name who this text is about, because it names them itself and because the naming is the thing Christianity has spent centuries filing under other business.

Isaias says the poor. The Latin says pauperes. Not the spiritually poor, not the poor in some extended sense that lets everybody in the room feel included. The people with no money, in a court, where money is what a hearing costs.

And Isaias makes their outcome the measure of the Messiah himself. Not a consequence of his holiness. The measure of it. Whence is this to me, asked in that room, is a question about a verdict rather than about a soul.

The teaching that needs testing here is our own, and it is a very old one. It is the habit of treating interior piety as the real business and what happens to poor people as a secondary matter, a social annexe to the faith, worthy but downstream. In its sharper form it goes further and reads a person’s poverty as evidence about their soul, so that the empty cupboard becomes a diagnosis. Every version of that arrangement fails the test in this Epistle on its own terms, because Isaias put the cupboard on the bench and left the soul out of the docket entirely. Whence is this to me becomes, under that teaching, a question you are expected to answer with your own worth.

Apply the fruit test the way Christ teaches it, to our own record. Where the church has preached patience to the poor and prudence to the comfortable, what grew? Where it has told people that their circumstances were a spiritual condition, what grew? We have the results. They are in the parish registers and the workhouse ledgers and in every family that stopped coming and never said why.

Whence is this to me, asked by somebody who is poor, has been answered wrongly by us so many times that the question now arrives pre-flinched. It came to you because you were deserving, which means it can be withdrawn. It came to you as charity, which means you owe. Isaias answers it a third way, and his answer is that it came because that is where it was always going, and your being at the bottom is not the obstacle, it is the address. Whence is this to me, and the honest answer is a direction of travel.

This is a different claim from the one made on Monday, which was about what a room demands from you before it hands anything over, and about people with nowhere to live. That was a question about entry conditions. This is a question about who the whole thing is scored against, which is a different argument on a different text, and both can be true at once. Whence is this to me is not a question about the door. It is a question about the scoreboard.

What This Is Not Saying

Two limits, stated here rather than left for anyone to supply.

The first is that nothing in Isaias blesses the condition. He does not say the poor are fortunate to be poor, or that being at the bottom is a spiritual advantage, or that the hearing they are owed is a substitute for the money they are not owed. He demands an outcome. He shall judge the poor with justice is a claim about what has to change, not a consolation offered instead of change. Any reading of this passage that leaves the cupboard empty and calls it holiness has inverted it.

The second is that the unanswered question is not an instruction to stop asking practical ones. Whence is this to me stands open in the Gospel, and that costs Elizabeth nothing, because she is not in trouble. Where somebody is in trouble, the open question is not a virtue and the concrete answer is not a failure of faith.

Ask what help exists. Ask who has it. This offering is not a suggestion that the spiritual reading of a shortage is the useful one.

The Round

There is a story sometimes told of a man who ran a Friday delivery round for a community pantry in a market town, four addresses that could not get to the door of anywhere else.

He was in recovery, and he would not have told you he was doing well. Asked, he said something noncommittal about it being one of those weeks and went back to stacking. He did not think of himself as a reliable person. He had the van keys because the woman who used to have them moved away in the autumn and somebody had to.

What was true about that Friday is not anything about his condition, which he could not have reported accurately and did not try to. What was true is that by half past three, four people who had not been out of their flats since Tuesday had a box each. The first address opened the door before he knocked. The second never answered at all, and the box went in the porch out of the rain, and that was never resolved either way. The third took hers at the step and shut the door, which was what she always did.

The fourth was a man who kept him talking for twenty minutes about a football result from the previous Saturday, going through it with some care, and did not mention the box once.

That is the whole story and it does not improve. He was not thanked in any way he would have recognised as thanks. Nothing in the afternoon told him what he wanted to know about himself. And the measurement of the round was never in him in the first place. It was in four porches and a doorstep, in somebody else’s hands, exactly where Isaias put it.

Whence is this to me, said the man on the fourth doorstep, more or less, by talking about football for twenty minutes to somebody who had come to his gate. He did not put it in those words. He did not have to.

Whence Is This to Me

The Introit this Mass opens with says only Thou art near, O Lord. Not near to the deserving, not near on terms. Near, stated flat, before a single reading has been heard.

If you take one thing from an Ember Friday, take the structure and not the theology, because the structure holds either way. The proof of a good thing is where it went. We spent an early Advent morning on the feet of the ones who carry things, and the feet were beautiful for where they arrived rather than for whose they were.

Not the quality of the person who carried it, which cannot be audited from inside and does not need to be. Where it went, and who was reached, and whether the people with the least claim on it were at the front of the queue or the back. Whence is this to me is answered by the queue.

Whence is this to me. Ask it. Let it stay open. Elizabeth’s stayed open and she is the one the Gospel calls blessed four verses later, without ever going back to tidy up the question.

And if you are the stump today, if the trunk is gone and the field looks finished, the Epistle is not asking you to account for yourself. It is telling you where the green thing comes up. Out of the root. At the cut. Whence is this to me is the correct response and there is no wrong answer to it, because it was never a test.

↑ The order resumes below.