ANTICIPATION LIFTS THE HEART. Desire is created to be fulfilled— perhaps not all at once, more likely in slow stages. Isaiah uttered his prophetic words about the renewal of the natural Creation into a wilderness of spiritual barrenness and thirst. For him, and for many other Old Testament seers, the vacuum of dry indifference into which he spoke was not yet a place of fulfillment. Yet the promise of God through this human mouthpiece (and the word “promise” always holds a kind of certainty) was verdant with hope, a kind of greenness and glory. A softening of hard-heartedness, a lively expectation, would herald the coming of Messiah. And once again, in this season of Advent, the same promise for the same Anointed One is coming closer.
My father, a vigorous preacher and a man of God, was stricken with leukemia in his eighties. In the final weeks of his illness he wrote a farewell letter to all his friends describing his excitement at the prospect of heaven, and of meeting Christ face to face: “I feel like a boy expecting a new bicycle!” He could hardly wait. And yet, of course, though an impatient man, he had to. When he finally died into the light, we grieved, but mostly we were grateful for him and for his release.
Just as in Lent, the season of watchful waiting and preparation for Jesus’ dying and the great transformation of his rising, so in Advent, we wait for his coming down to be with us once again. The word Lent is derived from the Middle English lente, meaning “Spring,” and in French “lent” means slow. In winter it seems that the season of Spring will never come, and in both Lent and Advent it’s the waiting that’s hard, the in-between of divine promise and its fulfillment, like a leap across a ditch after take-off and before landing. Most of us find ourselves dangling in this hiatus, which in the interval may seem a waste of time.
We drum our fingers on the steering wheel as we wait for the light to change. We wait, gnawing with anxiety, for the telephone call that tells us we got the job- For politicians’ promises to be fulfilled. For our health to improve. For our headstrong children to grow up. For Jesus to come and resolve the world’s confusion and pain.
Paul gives us an astonishing understanding of waiting in the New Testament book of Romans, as rendered by Eugene Peterson, “Waiting does not diminish us, any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We are enlarged in the waiting. We, of course, don’t see what is enlarging us. But the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy.” With such motivation, we can wait as we sense God is indeed with us, and at work within us, as he was with Mary as the Child within her grew.
Though the protracted waiting time is often the place of distress, even disillusionment, we are counseled in the book of James to “let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete.” Pain, grief, consternation, even despair, need not diminish us. They can augment us by adding to the breadth and depth of our experience, by enriching our spectrum of light and darkness, by keeping us from impulsively jumping into action before the time is ripe, before “the fullness of time.” I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.
From Luci Shaw, “Third Sunday of Advent,” in GOD WITH US: Rediscovering the Meaning of Christmas, edited by Greg Pennoyer & Gregory Wolfe
