O Radix Iesse
The Lord, in Isaiah, shows a supreme disdain for display. Assyria might think itself a towering cedar, yet ‘the Lord of hosts will lop the boughs with terrifying power; the great in height will be hewn down, and the lofty will be brought low. He will cut down the thicket of the forest with an axe, and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall’. This is how the image of Jesse’s root is introduced. While the monumental visibility of worldly presumption is reduced to nought, a crucial work of regeneration is going on underground. The future devolvement of salvation history is prepared subterraneously. The root—that is, the manifestation in space and time of God’s promise—has not lost its generative potential. The collective entities of city and forest have been burnt down; what sprouts is a single shoot, a flower of the field, to initiate a new dispensation. You can listen to my second Kraków Advent meditation here. And you can hear the antiphon O Radix Iesse sung by Dominicans here.
