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Advent Devotional for Friday, December 24
Love changes the way we see. Parents who welcome a child into their arms for the first time proclaim, “Isn’t she the most precious baby ever!” Long-time friends experience one another as the very epitome of trustworthiness. Couples, decades into their marriage, say to one another, “You are the most beautiful person in the world.”
People make these kinds of bold statements all the time, acclamations borne out of love. Are they truth statements? The most precious baby ever? Most trustworthy friend? Most beautiful person in the world? Surely other babies out there cry less and are less colicky. There are undoubtedly other friendships that, through trust, change the course of history. And, more beautiful faces than the wrinkled visage of an aged spouse surely are plenteous …
Here, in this very passage, John tells us that all those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them. That bold statement is the one that bears truth into all those other bold statements. Those who love see others as God sees them: faces of beauty, including their wrinkles; faithful friends, including their inadequacies; precious children, including their aggravating habits. Those who love participate in God’s love — a love that changes our vision, a love that always was possible because God first loved us in Jesus Christ.
Here, at the end of Advent, we celebrate the gift of love that makes a new way of seeing possible: God’s love in and through Christ that considers every face to be the most beautiful in the entire world. Impossible, you say? Not for the loving God who abides in us.
Holy God, in Jesus Christ you have shown us the true face of beauty, borne of your love for the world. Increase your love in and through us so that we might begin to see all of your creation, and your creatures, as you do. Amen.
David Jensen
Interim Academic Dean and Professor of Constructive Theology
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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