Isaiah 64:1-9; Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37
“Therefore, keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the
evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn” (Mark 13L35). “God will also strengthen
you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians
1:8).
It has been rightly said of our Christian faith that if we were to witness it in its earliest
beginnings we might not recognize it. Holiness of life among its first practitioners, yes; mutual
support and warm-hearted charity, to be sure; but an eagerness and an enthusiasm, even an
ecstasy, was there such as we know of today only at second or third hand. I am speaking about
a Jewish excitement anticipating the last days that is scarcely to be found in modern Judaism
except in some small pockets of Hasidic piety. Christian Pentecostalism keeps the ecstatic spirit
alive somehow, but it is the Bible reality simulated rather than lived. The problem there is that
history must be set aside as if it did not exist by people who go on living in history. In Jesus’ day,
even as in that of the prophet-poet who wrote the second half of the book of Isaiah and St.
Paul, a whole religious culture lived in readiness for God’s final inbreaking action. Expectation
was the foremost reality of their lives.
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
We have all become like one who is unclean,
and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We all fade like a leaf,
and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. (Isaiah 64:1, 5).
It is possible to conceive great religious images with poetry like that ringing in your ears.
Judgement, trial, purgation. All those matters become the stuff of life if Isaiah is at your hand.
But if you have to settle for advertising jingles as we do or a month of Christmas music to
encourage sales, it is no wonder that our souls rise to no heights whatever and our monument
will be a thousand lost golf balls. In ancient Israel it was not so. The poetry of anticipation ade
waiting for God’s future the greatest reality of life.
Our holy and beautiful house,
where our ancestors praised you,
has been burned by fire,
and all our pleasant places have become ruins.
After all this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord?
Will you keep silent and punish us so severely? (Isaiah 64:11-12)
Some people read the books of the prophets and it feeds their mania. Others rehearse the
imagery and are nourished in their souls. The Roman church, mother of all the churches of the
West, has long had the custom of reliving what were thought to be the 4,000 years between
Adam and Christ in a four-week time of waiting. It is important for us to learn how to wait.
Most of us realize that God gives us time as a gift. Do we use it well? I mean in waiting “God is
faithful and it was he who has called [us] to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord” (1
Cor. 1:9).
Jesus taught, “Be constantly on guard! Stay awake! You do not know when the appointed time
will come.”
Sometimes we say impatiently, indeed rudely, “What are you waiting for? Christmas?” I do not
think Christmas is what we are waiting for in Advent. No one waits and hopes for something
that has already happened. Above all, Jesus’ birth is not what we are waiting for. We are
waiting for an advent itself, God’s advent, and the best sign of it there is, is the waiting. If God
were to come – I mean come like everyone else – that would not be God. God is the one who
precisely does not come but is only waited for.
The Nativity is a splendid feast. But Advent is chiefly about something else. Christmas is not of
major significance to children, because in it their hopes are rewarded, their dreams fulfilled.
Christmas means a lot more to adults, or can, because it is a time of emptiness, of longing, even
– indeed especially – when it arrives.
The God of the heavens and the earth, there only God there is, is a God whose being with us –
we call this God Emmanuel, God with us, God for us – is as much a non-event as an event God
fills us with hunger and thirst. God promises to come in response to our longing. And then God
does not come. It is the only way we can recognize the one true God.
We want God’s kingdom, God’s rule, the life of justice, the life of peace – we want it fiercely,
terribly. We want it when God will send it. Meanwhile, we show our total trust in God. We wait
for God’s coming.
Kevin+
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