O Morning Star

(Christmas Art - Rosy Kandathil - found here)

“Those of us who live in brightly lit towns and cities may not know what it is to wait with longing for the morning star, visible when all around is still dark, heralding the approach of daylight. Where there is no artificial light, the morning star brings a slight but marked alteration in the quality of the surrounding darkness. It hovers tantalizingly on the edge of dark and daylight. It is perhaps this liminal quality that makes it a powerful Advent title for Jesus: as we wait for this birth that heralds God’s conquest of the dark, we are still in a contested world, one where the darkness still seems in control, and yet there is the glimmer of light as the one star emerges.

In the Bible, light and dark are often motifs that circle around choice and judgement. In Romans 13.12, salvation is the bright day we are longing for, just over the horizon, and now is the time of the morning star; soon it will be broad daylight, and we must be ready for all our deeds to be seen. There is a mixture of hope and fear in these motifs, as we both long for and shrink from the life-giving, revelatory light. We cannot live without it, but somehow we have persuaded ourselves that our grey half-lit lives are enough. 

The coming of the day is inexorable: nothing can hold it back, no one can delay it, and yet it comes so gently that it is hard to say at which precise moment the day starts and the night is definitely over. Like so many of the Advent themes, this calls us to reimagine the power of God at work in Jesus.”

~Jane Williams