Hope in the Tension of Opposites

As we read in Luke 2:8-14, the angel message came at night to shepherds who were guarding their sheep on the hillsides. They surely knew the skies well and perhaps found comfort in the familiar patterns of stars. Nightly doses of spangled wonder likely made them ripe for a message from afar.

Imagine the shepherds’ experience of the brilliance of the heavenly host visiting them in the pitch black night. In that moment, both completely in the dark and fully bathed in light, they heard God’s news of peace and goodwill toward all. There with the dirt of the Judean hillside on their robes, the lowly shepherds were met with the glory of heaven. With the arrival of Jesus the Christ, the world they would inhabit would forever include both light and darkness. At the same time. 

So it is with our lives that include both sorrow and joy, hardship and ease, longing and contentness, imperfection and beauty. As challenging as it is, we must hold these two competing ideas in tension with one another, knowing that God’s vision for our world is bigger than all of our categories. 

“Oh hush the noise,” Sears says, and hear a message of hope: the angels’ heavenly music still floats over all the weary world, even above the sad earth, even amidst the cacophony of “Babel-sounds. Yes, even as humankind is at war with humankind, the angels sing of peace. What then is left for us to do but to rest beside the weary road and hear the angels’ glorious song of old?

REFLECTION QUESTION(S):

1.Can you begin to discover a peace that resides within the tension of opposites?

2.Give yourself the gift of wonder this Advent season. What opens up in a place of wonder?

Annunciation to the Shepherds.  This painting is by Filipino artists and was created in 2016 as part of a display of inculturated sacred art in Manila Cathedral. 

WRITTEN BY

Garrell Keesler