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According to Leo Tolstoy, “Everything comes in time to him who knows how to wait” – a view that is consistent with tomorrow’s epistle reading from the Second Letter of Peter: “Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.” The trouble is that we are not very good at waiting because we live in the age of “on demand”. Any hint of delay is frustrating because it reminds us that we are not in control. We see this in the Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot where two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, who long to know why they were put on the Earth, believing that there must be some reason for their existence, wait patiently for the mysterious Godot to provide an explanation.
Waiting is an essential element of faith because, as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, it “is the substance of things hoped for” – something acknowledged by the church in that it provides an entire season of waiting called Advent, during which we renew our longing for a new and better world but are told we must wait. That is not easy in a world where evil seems to be in charge or where many struggle with illness or grief. We share the frustration of the psalmist: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts, and day after day have sorrow in my heart?”
In his book Turned by Divine Love, John Stroyan, former Bishop of Warwick, recalls a silent pilgrimage in the Sinai desert and how the experience stripped him of any illusions of self-sufficiency that he may have had and how necessary it was to learn to be patient: “The desert involves waiting and perhaps much waiting. One of the things to be handed over altogether is timing: my timing, my expected timing, even my longed-for timing for God to act. In the desert, we discover that the Christian life can never truly be lived with the attitude of ‘God on my terms’ but only ‘God on God’s terms’. In the desert we are reduced to a place of powerlessness, a crucifixion of the egotistical self, where we have no option but to give our lives fully back to God. But the good news of the gospel is that the promise of God is to do precisely what we cannot do without him. We see this in the many prophecies of Isaiah, where God promises to make the desert fertile: ‘I will make the wilderness a pool of water and the dry lands springs of water.’ God promises to do what is humanly impossible, to do what we could never do for ourselves.”
Nonetheless Christian waiting and looking forward is never just a passive thing. It is about allowing our hope for the future to change the world in which we are living now. It is about being open to the challenge of the Spirit, recognising where God is already at work and calling on us to join in. We are not just imagining the future. We have a God who works today in our lives to make this future a reality and calls us to join in with him.
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According to tomorrow’s Gospel, John the Baptist emerges – interestingly from the desert or wilderness – to announce the coming of Jesus. Fr Henri Nouwen suggests what this coming is about, what Jesus reveals to us about God: “The truly good news is that God is not a distant God, a God to be feared and avoided, a God of revenge, but God is moved by our pains and participates in the fullness of the human struggle. God is a compassionate God ... he is a God who has chosen to be with us.” News well worth waiting for.