There’s a strange kind of reverence children learn from the Elf on the Shelf. You can look at him, delight in him, whisper to him—but you cannot touch him. Touching him, we were told, would break the magic and drain the mystery. So we learned early that some things are meant to be beheld from a distance.
Advent can feel like that too: God just out of reach, grace perched on the mantle, close enough to see but not to hold. And then today we meet Balaam, a man whose entire vocation is seeing: “The utterance of one whose eye is true… of one who sees what the Almighty sees, enraptured, with eyes unveiled.” Balaam looks upon Israel and beholds not a wandering, imperfect people but beauty—tents like gardens beside a stream, a nation rooted like cedars planted by the Lord. He sees what they cannot yet see in themselves: promise unfolding, holiness gestating, a star rising from Jacob though still far off.
Advent is this kind of sight: the ability to glimpse what is not yet near—to look at the world, or at your own life, and see beyond what is visible. To hold hope you cannot touch.
The psalm echoes this longing: “Teach me your ways, O Lord.” Not the ways of certainty or spectacle, but the quiet ways—humble paths where God guides and remembers. Advent asks us to walk those paths even when the star is faint and the tents of our own hearts feel anything but “goodly.”
Then Jesus enters the Temple, and authority itself is questioned. The chief priests demand credentials; they want a God they can categorize, contain, and control. But Jesus answers with a question that exposes their fear. You cannot receive revelation if you are committed to maintaining power. You cannot touch the holy if you are afraid to be changed by it.
Advent is the opposite of that fear. It is the season when God draws near not to be inspected but to be invited—not to defend authority but to disclose love in its most human form.
The Elf on the Shelf loses his magic when touched. But the God of Advent—the God who approaches in a star, in a stream, and in a carpenter’s son—becomes most real precisely when we dare to reach out, to let hope land in our hands, and to let ourselves be changed.
Show us, Lord, your love, and grant us your salvation.
