Waiting is one of the major themes of Advent. Most of us don’t like to wait. It starts when we are children. “Are we there yet?” Nearly every parent has heard those words. It doesn’t get any better when we become adults. We don’t like to wait in line or in traffic. We often consider waiting to be a waste of time.
Waiting is what we do when we can’t do anything else. Waiting is what we do when we have done what we could, but there is nothing more we can do to take control of a situation. Waiting is what we do when we can’t make something happen when we want it to happen. We suffer from what John Ortberg (Eternity Is Now in Session, p. 1) calls “destination impatience.” We don’t like passivity. We don’t like waiting around. Waiting can be especially hard when we are waiting for news from the doctor and the prognosis is grim. Waiting can break us. It can break our hearts when we wait for an estranged son, daughter, or spouse to be reconciled to us.
Advent is about waiting, about learning how to wait when God is in the picture. Waiting can be a good thing, depending on what it is we are waiting for and how we wait.
WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR?
So, what are we waiting for in Advent? Just to be clear, Advent is not about waiting for Christmas. It is not about adding a little bit of spirituality in our lives to occupy us while we wait for the big day. What Advent is all about is waiting on God to keep His advent promises, and His advent promises are the promises He has given us about the restoration of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God is the central theme of the advent promises in the Bible. This is what the promises of Christ’s first advent were all about, and this is what the promises of Christ’s return from glory are all about. Advent is all about waiting on our Lord for the complete fulfillment of His promises of the kingdom of God.
What is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is the reign of God. It is God’s will being done as perfectly on earth as it is in heaven (this is one of the petitions in the Lord’s prayer: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.) When God’s kingdom is here in its fullness, there will be no more evil, hatred, violence, and war; there will be no more oppression or social injustice. The “rod of the oppressor” will be broken, and the implements of war destroyed (Isaiah 9:4-5). This kingdom is cosmic in scope. It encompasses all of creation, including a new, restored earth, (Isaiah 66:17; 66:22; Revelation 21:1-4). There will be no more tears, sickness, disability or death, and God Himself will dwell with us on the earth (Revelation 21).
The promises of the kingdom are Advent promises because the kingdom of God is not brought about by human effort but by God coming into this world in the person of his Son, Jesus the Christ. Christ came to overcome the power of evil and to complete God’s redemptive purposes. Christ came during His first Advent which we celebrate at Christmas to inaugurate the kingdom, and He will return to establish His kingdom in its fullness.
Jurgen Moltmann, in his book, The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology, distinguishes between two opposing views of the future, using two Latin words, futurum and adventus. Futurum is the future as an extension of the present. It is a future that we plan for and work for; it is not a radical break from the present, but built on utopian wish fulfillment.
If history has taught us anything, human utopias quickly become dystopias in which the oppressors of the past are overthrown and replaced with a new regime of oppression. In the words of Peter Townsend of The Who in Won’t Get Fooled Again, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Adventus, on the other hand, is the coming of God; adventus is God breaking into history and doing something new, establishing His kingdom as a radical departure from anything that preceded it. And because God is the sovereign Lord of history, we can hope in His promise, because what He says He will do.
This is something worth waiting for! Waiting for this is a good thing, because it gives us hope to sustain us with all of the brokenness, sorrows, and suffering in this life. The apostle Paul, who knew something about the sufferings of this world as well as the glory of what is to come, wrote “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. (Rom 8:18-19 ESV)
HOW THEN, SHALL WE WAIT? WHAT IS “WAITING”?
Henri Nouwen, in a short essay titled, “A Spirituality of Waiting,” provides some helpful counsel about waiting. Waiting, he writes, is movement. We wait because we have received a promise from God, and He has already begun to do something in our hearts. We are waiting because the beginning of what we are waiting for (which I have identified as the kingdom) has already been planted like a seed in our hearts. Waiting is movement from what God has started in us toward our future hope. When Christ’s reign has already begun in our hearts, our lives will be oriented toward Him and His promised future.
Secondly, Nouwen says that waiting is active. We are not waiting passively on the sidelines for God to come and do what He is going to do. I take this to mean that we are to be agents of God’s kingdom now while we wait for it to come in its fullness. I will have more to say about this in a future post.
Third, waiting is patient. Nouwen describes it this way: “Active waiting means to be present fully to the moment, in the conviction that something is happening. A waiting person is a patient person. The word “patience” means the willingness to stay where we are and life [sic] the situation out to the full . . . patient people dare to stay where they are. Patient living means to live actively in the present and wait there.” My take on this is that as agents of the coming kingdom, we can get discouraged when the changes we desire in a situation are not immediately forthcoming. Sometimes we get discouraged about our own spiritual progress or the lack of progress in someone we are trying to help.
Fourth, waiting is open-ended. This means recognizing that there is a lot about the future that we do not control. Open-ended waiting requires us to relinquish control to the God who holds our future. Nouwen makes a very profound point here: “To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God’s love and not according to our fear. The spiritual life is a life in which we wit [sic] actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control.”
And last of all, waiting is hope. I noted in an earlier post that Christian hope is not wishful-thinking. Christian hope is grounded solidly in God’s sovereignty and God’s promises. God will do what He promised that He will do. Therefore, we can and should actively wait on Him to bring about the promised future. “Waiting” and “hope” are frequently conjoined in Scripture, and in some cases, the same Hebrew word could be translated as either “wait” or “hope.”
I will have more to say about how we should wait for the promised kingdom in a future post. It should be no surprise that Jesus had a lot to say about this subject.