In 2007, on my first visit to Israel, I spent several hours at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, including a tour of the Dome of the Rock, where the Jewish Temple stood during Jesus’ life, until its destruction by Rome in AD 70.
Beneath the great gilt dome on the Temple Mount today is a quiet place for Islamic worship, and beneath the blue-tiled floor is a narrow stairway leading to an underground chamber with a distinctive rocky outcrop at its centre.
“This is the place,” said my Muslim guide, “where Abraham sacrificed his son. This is Mount Moriah.”
The famous biblical story is told in Genesis 22, where God tells Abraham to take a three-day journey from his home at Beersheba.
“Take your son,” God says, “your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about” (Gen 22:2). Abraham obeys, and God graciously provides a ram in place of the son.
And the city waited.
The site of Mount Moriah has no further historical significance for several centuries until the time of King David, and an event recorded in 2 Samuel chapter 24. A plague tragically kills 70,000 Israelites, and David builds an altar and offers sacrifices to turn away God’s wrath. God hears David’s prayer, and the plague eases (v. 25). The place of David’s prayer was the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite, which David subsequently purchased.
And the city waited.
A few years pass, and David’s son Solomon is now king of Israel, and he begins the great task of building a temple for the worship of God.
2 Chronicles 3:1 states: “Then Solomon began to build the Lord’s temple in Jerusalem on Mount Moriah where the Lord had appeared to his father David, at the site David had prepared on the threshing floor of Ornan [Araunah] the Jebusite.”
And the city waited.
Fast forward about 380 years, and Solomon’s descendants are forcibly deported to Babylon under King Nebuchadnezzar – another defining moment in Jewish and biblical history.
And the city waited.
Fast forward another six centuries, and just outside Jerusalem there’s a pregnant woman, and her betrothed partner, seeking lodging as they return to their ancestral lands to register for a Roman census.
And the city waits.
Today is the first Sunday in Advent, marking the beginning of the church year or liturgical calendar. For each Sunday in the church year, readings are assigned in a three-year cycle from the Hebrew Bible, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the New Testament Letters.
The theme of the first Sunday in Advent is hope, and today’s assigned psalm is Psalm 122, a “Song of Ascents,” of David. In the previous psalm, faithful Israelites anticipate their pilgrimage (or ascent) to Jerusalem, and pray for protection on the journey. Psalm 122 recalls the awesome experience of having arrived; their feet are planted on the stones of Jerusalem’s streets, and the sights, sounds and smells of the great city are all around them.
Some of the pilgrims have come from nearby towns and villages for the annual religious festival; others have travelled long distances. Psalm 122 is not a prayer but a poem. God is mentioned, but not invoked. It is about remembering, recalling, reflecting on a living faith. And there are whispers of hope. Listen to verses 1-5:
1 I rejoiced with those who said to me,
‘Let’s go to the house of the Lord.’
2 Our feet were standing
within your gates, Jerusalem –3 Jerusalem, built as a city should be,
solidly united,
4 where the tribes, the Lord’s tribes, go up
to give thanks to the name of the Lord.
(This is an ordinance for Israel.)
5 There, thrones for judgement are placed,
thrones of the house of David.
Those who gathered at Jerusalem for these great festivals were from various regions of Israel and Judah. There was diversity. There were differences between them – social, economic and ethnic differences, regional differences, linguistic and dialect differences, legal and customary differences, gender and family-structure differences, and differences based on education and training.
Psalm 122 is a beautiful implicit acknowledgement of this diversity, a grace-filled expression of aspiration for harmony and unity, with Jerusalem at the heart of the people’s faith, and God at the heart of the city’s life.
Like ancient Israel, there are times when we struggle with diversity. We work so hard to resolve harmony but we can’t quite succeed, and the unity we aspire to in our best moments remains just out of reach. And yet, we hold on to hope for a better tomorrow.
And the city waits.
Can you hear the whispers of hope in this ancient text?
Verses 1-2 whisper to me the hope of a common spiritual foundation, a shared religious tradition, a joint commitment to the one true God, a people whose hearts and voices are woven together in worship, celebration, optimism and joy.
Verses 3-4 whisper to me the hope of a common purpose. What is it that unites us? What are our common goals? What draws us together as a team, a community? Foster that, resource that, celebrate that.
Verse 5 whispers to me the hope of universal justice, of truth prevailing, of mercy experienced, of wrongs righted and the vulnerable protected and inequality dissolved. Reach for that ideal, speak out against injustice when it crosses your path, keep working for a better world, hold on to hope.
And verses 6-8 whisper to me the hope of shalom, the deepest human yearning for reconciliation, wellbeing, security, health, tranquillity, prosperity, and mutual flourishing – the opportunity for every person to fully embrace the unique potential God intended for them, experienced and expressed in the context of beloved community, spiritually grounded and practically engaged.
And still the city waits.
Imagine now the absence of the solid city of Jerusalem, the absence of “the house of the Lord,” the absence of those exciting and inspiring sights, sounds, and smells, the holy mystique of the ancient city. Imagine the city marked by an absence of the rule of law, and honest judges, and fair trade, and safety from violence and intimidation. Imagine a community shaped by endless war and no peace, a hellish place where darkness is exalted and light extinguished, a bestial world where all the humanising ideals of shalom are inverted.
This is not what any of us desires. This is not what our world needs. And so, the psalmist calls us to “Pray for the wellbeing of Jerusalem” (v. 6), to pray, “May peace be in you” (v. 8), to “pursue” the prosperity of “Jerusalem” (v. 9).
And the city waits.
And hope waits.
And we wait.
We wait, this Advent season, in anticipation of what God is up to, in anticipation of the unfolding of the grand metanarrative of redemption, in anticipation of the establishment of universal shalom, in anticipation of our small part in what God is doing in the world.
And we wait in prayer for the wellbeing of Jerusalem. And we pass on the whispers of hope that God breathes into our spirits. And we rejoice with those who say to us, “Let’s go to the house of the Lord.”
Hear the gentle whisper of hope for a common spiritual foundation. Hear the gentle whisper of hope for a common purpose. Hear the gentle whisper of hope for universal justice. Hear the gentle whisper of hope for the realisation of shalom.
As I close, and as we move from a consideration of the ancient perspective of Psalm 122 to our contemporary perspective as followers of King Jesus, the one whose arrival in humility and obscurity our season of Advent so gloriously anticipates, hear these grace-filled words from an almost forgotten report of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council:
To act is to hope. Despite the presence of much personal and communal suffering in the world, and despite frequent feelings of doubt or powerlessness, most people continue to act in loving, courageous and compassionate ways in at least some areas of their lives. This is in itself a sign of hope, albeit of a hope that is often hidden, implicit, unnamed.
For a Christian, hope is ultimately anchored in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The event of the Resurrection declares that when all hope is seemingly lost, when we have done the best we can and have apparently failed, when we have loved and been rejected, when we have been treated unjustly and have found no recourse, when we have finally been abandoned, when all this has happened and more, God will have the last word.
Why? Because God is God and his intentions for humankind will not be thwarted in the end. The Resurrection is both the sign and guarantee of this truth.[1]
One day, one glorious day, the wait will be over. Amen.
Sermon 837 copyright © 2025 Rod Benson. Preached at North Rocks Community Church, Sydney, Australia, on Sunday 30 November 2025. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from The Christian Standard Bible (Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020).
Reference
[1] Australian Catholic Social Justice Council, “Social justice in everyday life,” Issues Paper, 1990, in Building Bridges: Social Justice Statements from Australia’s Catholic Bishops, 1988 to 2013 (Alexandria, NSW: Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, 2014), 41f.
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