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Advent Devotional for Monday, November 28
They sat in company with the others, their eyes straining
against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His.” Thus wrote Zora Neale Hurston of Janie and Tea Cake and the others who had perilously underestimated the deadly force of an imminent hurricane. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.” Hurston’s phrase pinpoints the most surprising twist, of many, in the Book of Jonah. The eyes of the hated Ninevites were watching God, while Jonah’s eyes were cast down in anger and bitterness. The Book of Jonah knows that God is the God of sovereign freedom, forgiving and loving whom God will, even if it is our enemy.
There is a message of hope for all of us here, hope for the in-breaking of God’s undeserved mercy. But there is something deeply disturbing here, as well. There is the offense of God’s mercy toward the Other who violates the moral order of the world as we understand it. During Advent, the Book of Jonah demands that we acknowledge the “untamed dissonance,” in the words of Phyllis Trible, of the freedom of God in the world. The season of Advent offers us an invitation to steep in this ambiguity of a new way of seeing the world, a new ordering of the magnitude of Christ’s judgment and compassion for the world, even as we resist it.
“It’s uh known fact, Phoeby, you got tuh go there tuh know there,” Janie summarized after a long season of loving and resisting how the world was ordered. “Two things everybody’s got to do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.” Maybe this Advent we will make some progress.
God of newness, fearing change, we dare not raise our eyes. Longing for your loving gaze, we see only ourselves. Blinded by our failures, we ask for courage to behold the suffering earth, the weeping alien, the struggling soldier, the demoralized neighbor, the hungry child. In your light, may we see light. Amen.
Carol A. Tate
Austin Seminary Coordinator of Chapel Music and DMin student
For the glory of God and to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary is a seminary in the Presbyterian-Reformed tradition whose mission is to educate and equip individuals for the ordained Christian ministry and other forms of Christian service and leadership; to employ its resources in the service of the church; to promote and engage in critical theological thought and research; and to be a winsome and exemplary community of God's people.
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