In reading the texts assigned for this last Sunday before Christmas, I find myself returning again and again to a single line in the Isaiah passage—and I am struck by how painfully relevant it feels. Isaiah’s sharp question asks…
“Is it too little for you to weary mortals, that you weary my God also?”
The prophet exposes something—not only Ahaz’s personal fear and insecurity, but an even deeper illusion about power and a common construct of God. Ahaz imagines God to be like his own sovereign power: an authority to be appeased, a lawmaker who makes but does not follow law, a judge whose favor and rulings can be manipulated. Rather than listening to Isaiah, Ahaz relies on his own political calculation—on back-room alliances, threats, and retribution strategies. He refuses to look for God’s sign because his faith is in his own power.
I entered this Advent season contemplating the shadows and illusions of our day—the things that masquerade as truth and yet distort reality. And perhaps the deepest illusion in our public life today is this: that God’s highest concern is moral correctness and judgment.
This misrepresentation of God as merely a distant moral evaluator has leaked from the pulpits and into the cultural imagination. It undergirds media narratives, energizes political rhetoric, and weaponizes religious language for influence. For if God is imagined primarily as a moral judge, then any “good authority” is justified by promoting its moral purity claims. Scapegoating those who are “wrong” and claiming to be right (and righteous) becomes strategy. Even blatant falsehood and hatred are excused when framed as righteous necessity.
Isaiah’s rebuke reveals Ahaz’s folly…that fear-driven politics and theology wear humans out; and inevitably, it reduces faith to mere public performance and anxious control. And, according to Isaiah, this wearies God—not because God is exhausted, but because such illusions reduce God into something God is not.
The Advent theme for this final week is Love—as a growing culmination, a coming together with hope, peace, and joy into a fullness that reflects the Christ. As these realities are at work within us, something holy emerges. And this is where Advent invites us in the most embodied (incarnational) way.
These are not abstract spiritual concepts hovering somewhere above us. Hope, peace, joy, and love are real possibilities within the human body—etched into the nervous system, coiled in the emotional core, held within the chemistry of mind and heart. When they awaken, human wholeness becomes possible. Heaven—God’s presence—becomes our present reality.
This is the mystery of incarnation: matter and Spirit are not divided, but fully intertwined. We encounter God not by appeasing a distant judge but by awakening to Love already moving within and among us. And as we are more and more aware…Love animates us.
“God is love,” 1 John says. Love is not merely God’s action; it is God’s essence and reality. I reckon that is why John goes on to insist: if you do not love, you do not know God.
Not: if you obey.
Not: if you believe the right creed.
Not: if you vote correctly or defend your morality vigorously enough.
If you do not love, you do not know God! Which means our dominant cultural—and churchy—illusion that moral rightness is the ultimate measure is exposed as idolatry. It substitutes control for communion, fear for trust, judgment for holiness.
And in our day—as political theater wears golden crosses and speaks with pious religious words to shame or defeat—it does not reveal divine authority, but rather like Ahaz, human insecurity. When public figures claim righteousness while sowing lies and outrage, they are not defending God but denying Love.
Isaiah’s warning, this week’s Advent theme, and John’s “God is love” all meet here—as an invitation to see our wearying of God, our misrepresentation of what is true power. And we are invited back to the power of embodied Love.
And so this week, as the Advent candles burn in the darkness, the invitation is not toward moral appeasement but toward awakening: to notice where fear constricts the heart, to discern where our illusions about God have distorted our desires, to allow Love to reorder our way.
Perhaps the sign Isaiah offered—ignored by Ahaz and fulfilled in Christ—is this: God will always choose presence over coercion. God’s power is never expressed through domination but communion. Love is the reality through which God makes Godself known.
For sure, the shadows of this season are real. And Advent calls us to see through that darkness, to discern Love stirring within our very physiology, and to trust that heaven’s fullness begins not in measured moral performance but in awakened, attuned presence and loving action.
Shane Ash 