"Emmanuel: Glimpses of God Incarnate," December 16

Thursday, December 16

Isaiah 54:5-8

“God as Husband”

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART features a sixteenth-century painting by Jusepe de Ribera depicting the vision of Catherine of Alexandria who claimed to have married the infant Jesus in the presence of the Virgin Mary. While the notion of God as our husband may seem strange, it discloses a hidden truth of Advent. Equally odd to modern ears is the writer of Isaiah’s portrayal of Israel as an immature wife who “married young” and was sent away, whom the husband compassionately “brings back.” Even though these gender roles sound binary and paternalistic, jarring to modern ears, we may yet find truth in the image of God as a husband, wed not only to Israel.

Although the ancient Near East was not subject to today’s romanticism in which love is reduced to a saccharine inner feeling, marriage was not even then reducible to mere pragmatic pursuit of wealth and status. Then as now, marriage at its best involves being seen in the eyes of love’s compassion and generosity. A husband is one who sees, as no one else, a spouse’s idiosyncrasies; knows their stories, desires, wounds, and gifts; eats their cooking; hears the songs they sing in the shower; and dries their tears. If the husband truly sees the spouse, they find themself coming alive to their true self precisely as the husband’s co-respondent—I am called forth in relation to Thou. Because of the beauty the husband finds in the spouse, he is compelled to protect and provide for them. He gives the gift of truly seeing the spouse, and they return the same gift to him. Together, shaped by their shared blessing of “seeing truly” each other, the two become blessings to the world.

Advent finds me wandering in the desert, rummaging in the basement of my own ego, when my Beloved One draws near. In the compassionate and generous gaze of my Husband, my God, I am awakened and drawn into love’s generosity for the world. This is the gaze we meet in the New Testament as a babe in a manger, the one in whose gaze we are seen and in which we see the humility of love. The entire cosmos exists in the field of that husband’s gaze.

– Rev. Dr. David White, The C. Ellis and Nancy Gribble Nelson Professor of Christian Education