In this second of three reflections for Advent, Paul considers how some of the most hopeful things in the world are also the easiest to miss.
Though this blog is supposed to be all about paying attention, it appears I am not very good at it. Although I have been in and out of Stranmillis University College a fair bit in recent years, I have somehow failed to notice three very special trees in the college grounds.
They only came to my attention when I was researching the “survivor trees” of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for my Sunday sermon, and I discovered—to my surprise—that direct descendants were planted just a short walk from my home.
If you haven’t heard of these “trees of living hope” (to give them their other name), they are the trees that miraculously survived the atomic bombing. Charred, split apart, and left for dead after the deadly blasts, against all expectation and without human intervention, these trees pushed out new leaves the following spring.
Seeds from those trees are now growing quietly all over the world, including in the grounds of Stranmillis.
That these symbols of living hope have so far escaped my notice is, in a strange way, quite fitting. The Advent reading this week brings us to Isaiah’s image of hope as a young plant. That is to say, a hope that is slow, quiet, and all too easy to miss.
It’s an image that I am sure jarred with the expectations of Isaiah’s hearers, and which continues to run against our instincts today. When the world feels fragile, we tend to look for strength. We want assurances. We hope for certainty.
And so we find Isaiah’s image frustratingly tame—especially when he adds to the descriptors slow and quiet one that is even more confounding: tender.
What good is a tender hope? In a world as brutal as ours it feels risky, too easily uprooted, too fragile to survive.
In this sense, we can entirely understand Isaiah’s incredulity:
Who has believed what we have heard?
But though this might not be the hope we expect or even want, it is the hope we need. Because as counterintuitive as it might seem, tender hope is exactly the hope required when life is fragile—and for at least two surprising reasons…
The Surprise of Dry Ground
Though it is unexpected, Isaiah’s observation that hope emerges from dry ground chimes with many of us—myself included. I am only just about entering my middle years, but (from even my limited experience) I know that dry ground is what faith can sometimes feel like. There are times when prayer becomes thin. Scripture feels distant. Church becomes more like routine than renewal.
When the private writings of Mother Teresa were published after her death, many were surprised to discover that even this respected saint lived with long seasons of interior dryness. At one point she confesses:
The silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.
But why should we be surprised? When faith is lived with honesty in the world, isn’t this exactly what we should expect? Personally, I find it comforting to know that I am not alone in not always “feeling it” when it comes to God. And it encourages me to recognise that dryness is not the opposite of faith, as we might suppose; sometimes it is the very soil in which faith must grow.
As Thomas Merton once wrote:
The dryness that we fear may be the very way God opens the door to deeper prayer.
So, Isaiah’s first surprise is this: maybe the seasons which feel barren are in fact thresholds into deeper communion with God and a more attentive awareness of the Spirit’s presence.
The Surprise of Weakness
Isaiah’s description of the Suffering Servant figure is well known, but it still surprises:
…he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity,
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account.
No obvious greatness. No commanding presence. In a culture increasingly fascinated by displays of strength, this can feel hopelessly inadequate. So too can the Christian virtues associated with this lonely and despised figure—humility, gentleness, service. As such, many of us who seek to imitate this hope can carry the quiet suspicion that our lives are too small to matter, our faith too fragile to make a difference.
But Isaiah insists on something crucial: God works precisely through what the world overlooks.
After all, isn’t it often weakness that becomes the doorway through which grace enters?
That’s what we perceive in this image of the tender plant reaching through the dry earth. It’s a hope that might appear fragile, but it is in fact strong enough to carry the burdens no other can carry.
He has borne our infirmities… he was wounded for our transgressions...
The New Testament dares to put a name to this figure.
In the ancient hymn preserved in Philippians 2, Paul describes Jesus as one who “emptied himself,” embracing humility and vulnerability—even to the point of death—so that in this way he might be lifted up, and with him the weary weight of the world.
From this tender shoot, what looks like defeat becomes victory. What appears weak proves indestructible.
Hope endures—not by overpowering the world, but by entering into it.
And perhaps this is why those survivor trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain such potent symbols—and why I will be paying better attention the next time I am at Stranmillis. They stand as quiet witnesses to a truth the gospel has been telling for centuries:
That life planted by God cannot finally be destroyed.
That in what the world tries to burn away God can still send up new shoots.
That resurrection hope does not always shout loudly—most often it simply grows, tenderly, patiently, unnoticed, and yet irrepressibly alive.