What a Day!

A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, December 22nd, 2024:
The Fourth Sunday of Advent

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Psalm 80

R. Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth. Stir up your might, and come to save us.

R. Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Turn again, O God of hosts; look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine, the stock that your right hand has planted. 

R. Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

But let your hand be upon the man at your right, the son of man you have made strong for yourself. Then we will never turn back from you; give us life, and we will call on your name. 

R. Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

“Shine.” In a sense, this is the first command God spoke. A professor in Hebrew scripture points out that the word “shine” used in the Psalm for this Sunday and the word “shine” used in the famous priestly blessing – “the Lord make his face to shine upon you” (Numbers 6:25) – share the same root word as God’s very first commandment.

But if God shines with no creation to see Him, does He still shine? Well, yes – but thankfully He didn’t keep it that way. He created the angels, pure spirits. They first beheld the light that is God, first had full knowledge of Him. In the “day” the angels beheld His light (morning), then turned to look at the new thing He had made by dimming the light (evening), and returned to look once again at God/the light in the morning of the next “day.”
 
“The first day denotes their knowledge of the first of the Divine works,” says St. Thomas Aquinas, paraphrasing Augustine (we’re in good hands here), “the second day their knowledge of the second work, and similarly with the rest. Thus, then, each work is said to have been wrought in some one of these days … inasmuch as God wrought nothing in the universe without impressing the knowledge thereof on the angelic mind …. Moreover, angelic knowledge is appropriately called ‘day,’ since light, the cause of day, is to be found in spiritual things.”

Heaven is very bright, and it’s rightfully called the “eternal day.” As Revelation tells us, the streets are lit not by the sun or moon “for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.”

So as we pray with David “let your face shine, that we may be saved,” we are not asking God to turn on His nifty face-lamp and point it at us. As we’ve established, it has always been shining since the beginning of anything existing to know it. Instead, we’re asking for the strength, like that of the angels, to turn our gaze away from the things of creation and back to the Creator, and to keep it there. We’re asking for the Holy Spirit (Himself a flame, similarly rooted in the “shine” verb) to remind us that our light comes from sacraments and scripture, not the sun – in other words, to order our days “on earth, as it is in Heaven.”

This makes me reconsider “give us this day, our daily bread.” Breaking it open based on these ideas of “day,” we might get something like “direct our spirits towards the ‘daylight’ of Your constant outpouring of Your divine knowledge of Yourself, given as a gift to us until we see You clearly in Heaven, in the form of the sacraments and the Supper of the Lamb.” That’s not quite as pithy, though.

At this time of year, we’re near the shortest “day” of the year, but that’s a human day, a helio-day, if you will. When the sun’s rays are not shining as strong or as long these weeks, ask God to bring you a little closer to His light. As the Hebrew professor says, “God bathes you in His radiance. He commands Himself to do this constantly.” How’s that for a little light therapy?


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Kate Mosher

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