First Sunday of Advent (A) – Isaiah 2:1-5
Mountains attract and fascinate us. When I was a child, my parents would sometimes make weekend trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I loved going there. Ever since then, I have enjoyed every chance I have ever had to go up to the top of some hill or mountain and witness the views on the way as well as from the top. 
The mountaintop experience draws us out of ourselves. We see things from (literally) a higher and broader perspective. The town of Bar Harbor looks quite small from the top of Mount Cadillac. Sandia Crest looms a mile above the city of Albuquerque, New Mexico. That city seems to go on, block by block, almost forever when you’re in it. From the Crest, however, it looks like a mere patch of moss on the huge, sandy-colored rock that is New Mexico.
The mountaintop humbles us and our sense of greatness. It reveals to us a greatness beyond ourselves which nonetheless is present to us and exhilarates us. It is no wonder that so many ancient cultures imagined that mountaintops were the homes of their gods.
The mountain can speak to us in another way, however. We can miss its deepest message and settle for a caricature. We try to identify with the mountain itself – how it seems to dominate the surrounding area – and seek to emulate it. Now, it no longer lifts us out of ourselves, but becomes an expression of our ambitions. We want to loom over others and have them look up to us in some way. We try to build our own mountains. Our wealth, our achievements, our reputation. We may attempt this by bullying and intimidation. We may try it by becoming as useful and essential to others as possible. We may seek to amass possessions of whatever kind, and try to outdo others in this.
This approach has two fatal flaws. First of all, we are not the mountain. Therefore, any attempt to act like one will always leave us unsatisfied. Secondly, other people are busily building their own mountains. We envy them and seek to compete with them. We crow when we win and we fester in resentment when we lose. This creates rivalries, divisions, bitterness, and ultimately wars of every kind. We can even imagine that God is like us in that respect: in competition with us, seeking to loom over us as the biggest and best mountain, leaving the rest of us in the shadows of bitterness and fear.
As we begin this Advent season, the Lord reminds us, through Isaiah, that He doesn’t work like that. His mountain is not about rivalry or one-upmanship. Isaiah would have understood “the mountain of the Lord’s house” as being the Temple in Jerusalem, the symbol of God’s presence among His people. Looking back from a Christian perspective, we can see it as Jesus Himself, the new Temple.
Notice what happens in Isaiah’s prophecy. It looks very much like that first experience of the mountain that I opened with. People from everywhere are drawn to the Lord’s mountain, are lifted up beyond their narrow concerns by God’s Word, and now see things in a new light. Rivalry and resentment are over. The nations make their own swords into plowshares, their own spears into pruning hooks. War is no longer an option. Rivalry is exposed as silliness. All peoples recognize themselves as children of God and brothers and sisters of one another. In God, they have everything they truly need. They recognize that they can attain no greater status than that which God lavishes on them. They are welcomed home as God’s own children – forgiven, healed, raised up to communion with Him.
Now turn to Matthew’s Gospel, which we will focus on during this new liturgical year. As chapter 5 begins, Jesus sees people streaming to Him from all the surrounding regions. He goes up a mountain and begins to teach. The Beatitudes. The Sermon on the Mount. All the teachings that would spell out the implications of Isaiah’s vision and put it into practice. Teachings that, even now, raise us up to a renewed vision of all things as God sees them and intends them to be. Later, on a mountain, Peter, James & John would see a transfigured Jesus and hear the words “This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him.” The very last scene in Matthew’s Gospel, again on a mountain, finds the Risen Christ coming to His disciples and then commissioning them to teach everything they have been commanded and to gather people from all nations into His new people.
Faced with the daunting challenges of our daily lives, we can find that the world looks dark, foreboding, even terrifying. When we heed the invitation to come to the Lord’s mountain once again, He then lifts us up to see a renewed creation, a vision that can help us put our own struggles into perspective. We move on with renewed faith, assured that the God who comes to us in so many ways will always be faithful to His promises. We then carry an image of that mountain in our hearts. Once we do that, our lives are never the same.
Come, Lord Jesus!
Recommended reading: Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert And Mountain Spirituality