Advent Day 30: Redeemer

Christ the Redeemer Overlooking Rio De Janeiro. Sculptor/Designers: Heitor da Silva Costa, Paul Landowski, and Gheorghe Leonida, 1922–1931. 98 ft. tall with 92-ft. arm span, 635 metric tons, Reinforced concrete and soapstone. Corcovado Mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Public Domain.
Photograph: Artyominc, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Christ the Redeemer Overlooking Rio De Janeiro. Sculptor/Designers: Heitor da Silva Costa, Paul Landowski, and Gheorghe Leonida, 1922–1931. 98 ft. tall with 92-ft. arm span, 635 metric tons, Reinforced concrete and soapstone. Corcovado Mountain in the Tijuca Forest National Park, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Public Domain. Photograph: Arturdiasr, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

“O Come Redeemer of the Earth” from the album Advent at Ephesus, performed by The Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles, composed by Saint Ambrose.

“I Know that My Redeemer Lives” from the album That Easter Morning, performed by Millennial Choirs and Orchestra, composed by Samuel Medley.

Poetry:

“A Sort of Redemption”
by Peter Viereck

The tenderness, the dignity of souls
Sweetens our cheated gusto and consoles.
It shades love’s lidless eyes like parasols
And tames the earthquake licking at our soles.
Re-tunes the tensions of the flesh we wear.
Forgives the dissonance our triumphs blare.
And maps the burrows of heart’s buried lair
Where furtive furry Wishes hide like moles.
O hear the kind voice, hear it everywhere
(It sings, it sings, it conjures and cajoles)
Prompting us shyly in our half-learnt roles.
It sprouts the great chromatic vine that lolls
In small black petals on our music scrolls
(It flares, it flowers—it quickens yet controls)
It teaches dance-steps to this uncouth bear
Who hops and stumbles in our skin and howls.

The weight that tortures diamonds out of coals
Is lighter than the skimming hooves of foals
Compared to one old heaviness our souls
Hoist daily, each alone, and cannot share:
To-be-awake, to sense, to-be-aware.
Hen even the dusty dreams that clog our skulls,
The rant and thunder of the storm we are,
The sunny silences our prophets hear,
The rainbow of the oil upon the shoals,
The crimes and Christmases of creature-lives,
And all pride’s barefoot tarantelle on knives
Are but man’s search for dignity of souls.

Redeemer

I have found that a big challenge in parenting is mediating arguments between my children. Their perceptions of the event are wildly discrepant, and the phrases, “she always…” or “he never…” might leak out. A disagreement is never a discreet, isolated incident, but is rather another bit of grit on the sandpaper of that sibling’s being that is constantly shaping the other. When I reflect on my own experience, I see the ways that someone’s actions suddenly awaken me to the fact that I am not impenetrable, nor was I meant to be. At its most simplistic, “you, being you, affects me.” In the heat of argument, we are tempted to believe only the shadow side of relationality, that we can wound one another, and that I might become a more broken version of myself as a result. And indeed, there are many who have experientially learned this deeply because sin is insidious and uses our capacity for relationship to affect us to our detriment.

Christ the Redeemer by Paul Landowski stands overlooking the massive city of Rio de Janeiro, a diverse city of millions who share with the world a great array of experiences and relationships with one another. We might look to our own cities, churches, and even families and feel the sting of a mess too big, habits too entrenched, and disagreements too enmeshed within a history impossible to undo. Today’s passage from Isaiah is, too, embedded within Israel's community and relationships in which God saw rampant injustice (Isa. 59:15).

It is not enough that one righteous person’s perfection will be the end of injustice, as justice can only exist in a relational and communal context. Interestingly, this is where we find Job; righteous, but afflicted and friendless. In his article “Theodicy in a Social Dimension,” theologian Walter Brueggemann raises the challenging idea that in being afflicted by Satan, the overlooked injustice lurking in the book of Job is that Job’s friends did nothing to stand against the injustices Job faced. Just before today’s passage, in verse 7, Job calls out for help, “but there is no justice.” To tie in Isaiah’s words, “there was no man…no one to intercede” (Isa. 59:16).

There is debate as to whether Job, in the midst of his own experience of injustice, is calling for God to become his Redeemer or whether he is calling for his own family, his kinsmen redeemer, to intercede for him. Perhaps that is why it is so significant that in Isaiah God is looking for “a man,” a true human, living justly, spreading the knowledge of God relationally within a family, a community, and in creation. The incarnation meets the need of Job and Isaiah. God becomes man to make us just humans again. Gregory of Nazianzus summarizes the significance of the completeness of Christ’s humanity in this way, “For that which He has not assumed, He has not healed.” It is complete humanity, body and mind, that Christ takes on in the incarnation, and so body and mind are engaged in the redemptive process. So too did the Son assume family, ethnicity, culture, and place, all bearing relational and communal issues of division and injustice. For God to save me is one level of miraculousness, but for Him to save us begins to reveal the limits of what I have internalized about God’s redemption. The supremacy of the Redeemer is that despite how big and entrenched these issues are, his redemption, when complete, is somehow bigger than the injustices of the history of humanity. This is incomprehensible to me. By faith my concept of the Redeemer needs to enlarge.

Take time to hold the emotions that arise in you as you consider the ways you have been affected relationally by your family and community, and about the ways you have affected those around you. Do you feel hope? Grief? Anger? Fear? Does it feel safer to consider personal redemption rather than relational redemption?

As we consider what is stirred up, we might begin to see our own “half-learnt roles” as Peter Viereck words it in today’s poem. May we learn a new way of being human, one where we affect each other justly, in Christ and by the Spirit. Today’s music, “I know that my Redeemer Lives,” begins with a solo tone that tremulously stands in the background until it is finally swept into the melody of the community of voices and sounds that are each distinct, and yet, unified in praise. May we humbly put forth our note in faith that the Spirit would carry it, that it might both affect and be affected for our collective good and for His glory as await the fullness of His Kingdom.

Prayer:
Father,
For those who believe in your Son, you gave the right to become children of God, to enter into a family and into a new relationship. We are brought together by one Spirit, the same Spirit that you promised so long ago. Grow us into our humanity, not as the world would teach us about humanity, but that humanity which you redeemed us to. Make us into a people who live justly and who love mercy so that by the power of Your Spirit at work among us, your redemptive work may spread into ever greater relational and communal healing.
Amen

Stacie Poston
Adjunct Instructor
Torrey Honors College
Biola University