Advent Week 4: Love

Welcome to our Advent 2025 Visio Divina Series, a visual meditation practice we are using as an entryway into Advent. You can read more about this practice in our first installment of this series. Join us as we both receive and offer God’s amazing and boundless love.

Week 4: The Child’s Bath

The Child’s Bath by Mary CassattPublic DomainThis painting is located at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Questions for visio divina

1. As you begin, take a few deep breaths. While we know God is always with us, invite the Holy Spirit to be present and to speak to you afresh in these moments. Spend some time looking at the image. What do you see? Similar to doing Bible study, make as many observations as you can. What do you like or dislike? Why? What questions do you have?

2. How does the artist use color, light, style, composition, and material? What do you think the artist wanted to communicate? What stands out to you? Why do you think this is so?

3. Read Psalm 36:5b - 9 (below). How does this add to what you are seeing? Is there other Scripture that comes to mind?

4. Spend some time reflecting on the Scripture passage and looking again at today’s image. What is God’s invitation to you? What might you need to see, understand, or believe? How does your current life experience intersect with what you are seeing and reflecting on? How might this image help you pray today? What do you want to say to God? Ask from him?

Scripture passage

Psalm 36:5: 5b - 9

To the leader. Of David, the servant of the Lord.

5Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens,your faithfulness to the clouds.6 Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains,your judgements are like the great deep;you save humans and animals alike, O LORD.

7 How precious is your steadfast love, O God!All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.8 They feast on the abundance of your house,and you give them drink from the river of your delights.9 For with you is the fountain of life;in your light we see light.

Reflection

In this final week of Advent, we focus on the theme of love. We remember that love is the motivation behind what we celebrate in the coming days — For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son… (John 3.16)

Have you ever noticed how the writers of Scripture —from David to Paul— almost stammer when describing the love of God? To be fair, they are attempting to use finite human language to describe the infinite immeasurable love of the Triune God. In Psalm 36, David says it “extends to the heavens.” Exactly how far is that? He goes on to say it is precious. Other translations say “priceless.” The love of God for his world (humans and animals, alike [v. 6]) is limitless. There is no lack or scarcity of love or care. God’s incredible love is visible and experienced in an abundance of affection, provision, and protection. In Ephesians 3, Paul speaks of the width, length, height, and depth of the love of Christ and reminds us that this love that surpasses knowledge.

The word translated here in Psalm 36 into the English “steadfast love” is the Hebrew word hesed. As it often goes with Hebrew, there is not really one English word that captures its meaning sufficiently, which is why the NRSV added the adjective “steadfast” to help get at its fuller meaning. In his book exploring hesed entitled Inexpressible: Hesed and the Mystery of God’s Lovingkindness, Michael Card tells us

The vast range of [the meaning of] hesed is also made evident by the staggering number of English words translators employ in a frustrated effort to render it. The King James Version uses fourteen different words. It even borrows an elegant new word from Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation: “loving-kindness.” Coverdale made up this beautiful word specifically in an attempt to translate hesed, and it remains the favorite choice of many. But all these words barely began to capture the semantic range of hesed. Later translations resort to all kinds of compound terms, which provide a clue to the difficulty of reducing the Hebrew hesed to a single English word. (pg. 10)

Hesed is God’s everlasting-loyal-steadfast-merciful-kind love. It is God’s posture toward us. It is the way God loves us and it is God’s expectation that we would, in turn, show this kind of love to one another.

One of the images used in Scripture to illustrate God’s love for his people is that of a parent. While Father is the dominant parental image there are many maternal images used for God including the one used in Psalm 36 (and elsewhere) of a mother hen collecting her chicks under her wings for shelter and protection. It is an image of gentle care that I am reminded of as I look at Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath.

Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) was an American Impressionist painter. Because she came from a family of means, she was able to purchase painting supplies and pay for lessons and travel. She eventually went to Europe where she met Edgar Degas and fell in with the French Impressionists, becoming the only American to exhibit with them. She was trailblazer in many ways — succeeding in the very male-dominated art world (and in a style that pressed against conventions) as well as choosing to pursue painting rather than marry and have a family. And yet many of her paintings are of women and children, subtly elevating them by centering their common everyday activity.

Annalise Madsen, curator at The Art Institute of Chicago (who is curating a Cassatt exhibit for 2026-2027) has this to say about The Child’s Bath:

The Child’s Bath stands out as a tender portrayal of familial closeness — and also as a bold experiment of color, line, and form arranged on canvas.

Cassatt seems to draw from Madonna and Child images, reframing them in her own way. We see the influence of her interest in Japanese wood block prints in the room’s furniture and rug, especially. The position of the figures — pushed to the foreground and almost sliding off the page — as well as their gaze focuses the viewer’s eye to the primary activity. The woman (mother?) gently rubs the child’s toes. (Did she call them “piggies”?) It is a tender moment of trust, care, pleasure, and affection. And as one whose children are grown and now understands, it is a moment to be savored that will quickly be gone.

Is it hard to imagine the eternal Triune God who flung stars into space and whose mighty power “made the mountains rise” speaking and acting tenderly like this? Finding joy in lovingly caring for his children? In his chapter on the love of God in Knowing God, J.I. Packer writes these words:

God was happy without humans before they were made; he would have continued happy had he simply destroyed them after they had sinned; but as it is he has set his love upon particular sinners, and this means that, by his own free voluntary choice, he will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of them to heaven. He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.

Thus God saves not only for his glory, but also for his gladness. This goes far to explain why it is that there is joy (God’s own joy) in the presence of the angels when a sinner repents (Lk. 15:10), and why there will be “exceeding joy” when God sets us faultless at the last day in his own holy present (Jude 24 KJV). The thought passes understanding and almost beggars belief, but there is not doubt that, according to Scripture, such is the love of God. (pg. 125)

I’ll be the first one to admit that I struggle with understanding and receiving God’s love as well as extending it to others. I have issues! So I am grateful each week to have the opportunity to say with my church family, “We have not loved you with our whole hearts and we have not loved our neighbor as ourselves.” But my (in)ability to apprehend the love of God does not diminish the truth of its reality and part of what we long for as we await Jesus’s restoration of all things is our enjoyment of God in all his fullness including his amazing love for us. And his enjoyment of us! Until then we walk by faith. And we receive God’s love by his Spirit and through his people as they speak truth to us and do acts of loving-kindness for us. How might God be inviting you this Advent and Christmas season to grow in your understanding and experience of God’s amazing and steadfast love? And how might you, having received this love that knows no limit, offer its overflow to those around you?

Prayer

We rejoice, O God, in your abounding and steadfast love demonstrated to us in myriad ways, but most supremely in the gift of your Son. who for us and for our salvation took on flesh and came to dwell among us. By your Spirit come and fill our hearts afresh with the knowledge of your love that we may live in hope, peace, and joy as we await the final coming of Jesus when everything will be made new, and your dwelling place will be among us forever. Amen.