Thursday of the Second Week of Advent

December 10, 2020

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Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we pray with Psalm 145 in which the psalmist once again assures us that our God is 

The psalm extends the promises of our first reading from Isaiah:

The afflicted and the needy seek water in vain,
their tongues are parched with thirst.
I, the LORD, will answer them;
I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.

Isaiah 41:17

We need promises like those of Isaiah and our psalmist, especially in times when we feel tested, alone, frightened, desperate, or abandoned. Even a taste of these radical emotions is hard to bear without some glimmer of promise.

Faith tells us that the Promise is already fulfilled in the Gift of Jesus Christ. 

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Advent is our annual liturgical practice in waiting … in the recommitment

• to a faith that cannot yet see,
• to a hope that waits yet believes,
• to a trust that praises even in the predawn shadows.

Advent is our promise to lean
on an invisible God. 

Christmas is the astounding Divine response –
Jesus Christ – God made visible.

Poetry: Paul’s great poem from Colossians 1: 15-23

Christ is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation.

For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth,
the visible and the invisible,
whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers;
all things were created through him and for him.i

He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.

He is the head of the body, the church.
He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead,
that in all things he himself might be preeminent.

For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell,
and through him to reconcile all things for him,
making peace by the blood of his cross
whether those on earth or those in heaven.

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Music: Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise (1867) – Walter Chalmers Smith.
The original, beautiful final verses of this hymn have been lost in the English translation. Here they are, and worth their own meditation:

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight;
But of all Thy rich graces this grace, Lord, impart
Take the veil from our faces, the vile from our heart.
All laud we would render; O help us to see
’Tis only the splendour of light hideth Thee,
And so let Thy glory, Almighty, impart,
Through Christ in His story, Thy Christ to the heart.