Waiting in Faith (Advent 1)
I'm going to do a little Advent series in the lead-up to Christmas, as well as finish off a few reviews over the next four weeks. We're coming into the Australian summer and holiday season, and I tend to write posts in advance and blissfully forget about them until they get posted, so I also have various things in mind to write over the coming weeks to save for the new year. Some short, some long, I hope the variety and content continues to engage.
So, waiting. That seems like a fitting theme for Advent reflections. What is Advent? The season of the church calendar that marks the lead-up to Christmas, the first Adventus (Coming) of Christ into the world. Yet, at the same time, Advent is marked by readings that anticipate the second coming of Christ, the end of all things, the judgment of the world, and the restoration of all things in the Eschaton. As we wait for the Feast that remembers the Lord's first coming, we prepare ourselves and our hearts for the Lord's second coming.
There's plenty of waiting in the Scriptures. We, however, are going to start with Abram, and God's word to him in Gen 12.
1 And the LORD said to Abram, “Go forth from your land and your birthplace and your father’s house to the land I will show you. 2 And I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing. 3 And I will bless those who bless you, and those who damn you I will curse, and all the clans of the earth through you shall be blessed.” 4 And Abram went forth as the LORD had spoken to him and Lot went forth with him, Abram being seventy-five years old when he left Haran (The Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter)
The promise to Abram consists primarily of Land (a topic I'll return to in another post, for I have a lot to say about it), Posterity (v2), and Blessing. And the rest of the narrative from Gen 12 right through to 1 Samuel, is about the (long, slow) realisation of those promises. It's about waiting. It's the years of waiting of Abram for a son. It's the reaffirmation of the covenant with Abram in ch 15, alongside a very pointed prophetic word in 15:13-16 that there will be a 400 year delay before the promise of the Land will be delivered, and instead Abram's children will endure slavery. It's Abram's attempt to self-realise the promise in ch 16 by begetting a son via Hagar in ch 16, and the re-re-affirmation of the covenant in 17, and the always confronting and confusing call of God to Isaac to give up the very promised son, is the episode that seals and completes the Abraham/Isaac narrative and affirms the future of the promised Son.
Abra(ha)m, ever since the Lord first called him at the age of 75, spent his life in waiting. Not only that, when 24 years later he received the gift of a son, he lived with the knowledge that his offspring were going to be enslaved for 400 years before inheriting the rest of God's promise. Not only that, but God asked him to offer up the very promised son he had spent all this time waiting for.
I think there are two main lessons to be learnt from Abram's waiting. Abram's waiting is characterised by faith. I think that is (part) of what is going on in Gen 15:8, "And he trusted in YHWH and He reckoned it as proof of genuine fidelity". Abram's response to God's promise, at his best, is to trust it and wait for it. Indeed, the very character of waiting is determined by the fact that it is not contingent about one's own actions to bring about something, but upon something external. It is by definition a lack of agency. Waiting upon the Lord is dependence upon God to fulfil his own Word.
Abram's waiting isn't perfect though, is it? The Hagar/Ishmael narrative stands as a counterpoint - what happens when both Sara and Abram attempt to exercise their own agency to bring about the awaited realisation? They fail, and the consequences are, to understate it, 'not great'. At the same time, God does intervene here, to ameliorate their failure, to show compassion on the victims (Hagar, Ishmael), to forgive and not withdraw the promise, and to reaffirm the promise. It is, nonetheless, an object lesson - we cannot hasten that which we wait for.
Transposed to the Christian hope of Advent, we await Jesus' second coming. That coming does not depend upon us in any measure, and we live our entire lives in the anticipation that the Lord will fulfil his own Word, his own promises, and this calls for us to trust. The Scriptures as a whole testify to a God who repeatedly makes promises, and then keeps them, teaching us that He always has been and is faithful himself, and so worthy of our faith in him. Nor, we are warned, can we in fact realise that coming; the coming of the Kingdom lies outside our power and purview.