Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Advent 2 – Year A

Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19

Give it to the king, O G*D, give it to the king!

The king needs to have justice applied to the king and a filling of righteousness.

The king needs to have such justice and righteousness flow through them that they may be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers watering earth.

Who is this king? Let's listen in to a section from Matthew Fox's Wrestling with the Prophets: Essays on Creation Spirituality and Everyday Life. In writing of "Meister Eckhart and Karl Marx: The Mystic as Political Theologian", Fox comments:

"In a society that was as aware of privilege as was Eckhart's, the thesis that all are aristocrats is a far from subtle rebuke of the caste system then prevailing. But it is more than a rebuke--it is an imaginative alternative that Eckhart is suggesting. According to historian Jacques Heers, what characterized the popular uprisings of Eckhart's period and place was that even when the "people" overthrew one aristocracy, another immediately took its place. We see then how truly radical and imaginative was Eckhart's alternative: not to confront aristocracy but to recreate it entirely by baptizing all into it. Eckhart does not put down nobles and aristocrats, and he refuses to substitute a new dualism of the lowly over the privileged. Instead, with a dialectical imagination that only a mystic could muster, he makes the peasants into nobles. Instead, therefore, of putting down anyone, he elevates all. . . .

"Thus Eckhart reiterates his marvelous admiration for the nobility of the human person. Eckhart does not stop short of claiming that human beings give a home to the divine within them. For in us 'God has sowed His image and His likeness, and … He sows the good seed, the root of all wisdom, all knowledge, all virtue, and all goodness, the seed of Divine nature. The seed of Divine nature is the Son of God, the Word of God.' Eckhart's theology of personhood does not concentrate on sin and redemption but on divinization. In this regard he drinks fully of Eastern Christian spiritual theologies.

"'The seed of God is in us. If it was cultivated by a good, wise and industrious laborer, it would thrive all the more and would grow up to God, whose seed it is, and the fruit would be like the Divine nature. The seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree, a hazel seed into a hazel tree, a seed of God into God.'"

So what would it mean to have this Advent be an advent of your rising beyond the caste system of your culture, your society? Bloom where you are!