Shalom

The promise of God's shalom is not a thin attempt to distract us from our own darkness or a flimsy pat on the back for the profound brokenness of the world. It is not an image campaign to make us feel better, but the promise of one who can somehow hold it all. It is the promise of one who, somehow, is already about the profound work of our restoration and healing, which also, will one day be complete. Hundreds of years after Isaiah gave us this glimpse of shalom, that child from Bethlehem, where the hopes and fears of all the years intersect, stands up in a local synagogue, reading these very words of Isaiah, and announces that he is the fulfillment of Isaiah's lyric. Jesus is the promise of shalom, the one who is somehow able to hold ashes and still offer us beauty, who both mourns beside us and who dries our very eyes, who embodies the good news to the oppressed and is even now about the work of restoration in the deepest sense of human flourishing we could never imagine. In the phrase of fifteenth century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, Christ is the very embodiment of the moment of coincidentia oppositorum—the impossible moment when opposites meet. Might our hopes and fears of all the years rest in him tonight.

--Jill Carattini, Slice of Infinity, 6/20