Advent: Learning to Wait … Together

Advent has a twofold character: as a season to prepare for Christmas when

Christ’s first coming to us is remembered; as a season when that remembrance
directs the mind and heart to await Christ’s Second Coming at the end of time.
Advent is thus a period for devout and joyful expectation. (General Norms for the
Liturgical Year and the Calendar, 1969)

Bluish-purple. That is the colour that many liturgists suggest should be the colour of our
Advent vestments as Latin-rite Catholics. Not, they point out, the more reddish-purple
of Lent—the ancient “Roman purple,” tinged with scarlet, that speaks of kingship,
blood and suffering—but a darker, more somber hue, the colour of the night sky in
those final hours before the dawn, and thus a colour that speaks of expectation and
longing (what one liturgical author calls “barely contained hope”). Two sets of purple
vestments, they counsel us, to capture two very different seasons. For Advent, as we have
been repeatedly reminded since Vatican II, is something other than a shorter and less
Passion-oriented Lent.

Lex orandi, lex credendi: the way we pray defines what we believe. And so even the
specific colour of our Advent vestments itself points us to an attitude of waiting, of
anticipation, of hope and eagerness. It is in this attitude, and in this season, I believe, that
we are most powerfully united with our Jewish sisters and brothers. For the better part
of 2600 years, since the overthrow of the Davidic royal line at the time of the Babylonian
Exile in the sixth century B.C., the Jewish people have waited faithfully and with
unwavering hope for the coming of the Messiah. It is a waiting that has taken many
forms, and that sometimes has experienced “detours” or distractions, because of the
actions of false messiahs who came on the scene proclaiming themselves to be God’s
chosen messengers. There are some Jews who, faced with the unspeakable horrors of
the Shoah or Holocaust, concluded that faith in the Messiah had been a sad delusion—
that, if the Messiah did not come to save the six million Jews and five million others who
were slaughtered by the Nazis, then he would never come at all. The novelist and
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wrote that, if the Messiah did not come during that time
of the greatest suffering of his people, then it is now too late for him, and he need not
bother coming at all1. Several prominent Orthodox Jewish thinkers argued that the

1 See Wiesel, Gates of the Forest (New York, 1966), pp. 41ff., 215; cf. 42-43 and 223 (as cited in Irving
[Itzhak] Greenberg, “Messianic Time,” in Steven T Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg.
Wrestling With God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), p. 553.
brutal destruction of the Holocaust represented the painful “birth-pangs” of the
Messiah, who would now come swiftly as a result.

Others look to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and conclude that
this is the beginning, not so much of the time of the Messiah, but of a “Messianic Era,”
in which the Jews are at last able to return to their land and—at least theoretically—
dwell there in peace, although the events of the last 60 years have demonstrated how
short-lived and infrequent that Messianic peace has been. Some conclude that the whole
Messianic idea is wrong, and so they abandon it as having any meaningful part in their
life as Jews today. Some Jews are more agnostic, saying that they honestly don’t know.

And yet faith in the coming of the Messiah has traditionally been one of the great
defining characteristics of Jewish history. The medieval Jewish commentator and
scholar Maimonides (also called the Rambam) listed thirteen principles of faith, which
he said were essential to Judaism, in somewhat the same way as the Nicene Creed is
essential for us as Christians. Even today, these principles are printed in many Jewish
prayer books, in a form called the Ani ma’amin (which is roughly the Hebrew equivalent
of our Latin Credo), and the twelfth among them is: “I believe with complete faith in the
coming of the Messiah, and even though he may delay, nevertheless every day I will
eagerly await his coming”. According to Maimonides, to deny the promised coming of
the Messiah was equivalent to denying the existence of God Himself, and anyone who
did so forfeited their inheritance in the life to come. Although there is no single
“Jewish” concept of the Messiah that is unanimously accepted, I dare say that there are
still many, many Jews who hold to messianic hope in some form or another. This is
perhaps most visible in the Chabad Lubavitch movement within Judaism, which places
great emphasis on messianic expectation, and has hinted that perhaps its own Chief
Rabbi may be the promised one.

All of these little historical tidbits are simply to highlight the fact that, as Jews and
Christians, we are (or can be) fundamentally united in our waiting for the Messiah. Of
course, there is also a major difference between our two religious families—a difference
that is what essentially separates us as Jews and Christians. As Christians, we believe
that the promised Messiah has already come once, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth,
and we wait for Him to come again, on a day and at a time that only God knows, but
that we believe still awaits us in the future. Obviously, that is a belief that the Jewish
community does not share with us. For those Jews who believe in him, the Messiah is
still entirely a figure of the future, whose arrival is yet to come, and in preparation for
which they engage in what is called in Hebrew tikkun olam, the “repairing or healing of
the world”. The coming of the Messiah does not dispense them from doing whatever
they humanly can to reform, and transform, the world as God intended it, and as the
prophets demanded. Some modern Jews involved in interreligious dialogue have even
ventured the quite radical suggestion that, perhaps, at the end of time, the two spiritual
paths of Judaism and Christianity will be proven to be not so different after all. The
prominent Israeli rabbi and scholar Pinchas Lapide once said, in a dialogue with the
German Catholic theologian Karl Rahner: “That [the Messiah] will be Jesus of Nazareth
is a certainty for you, and a not-to-be-precluded possibility for me”2. Lapide allowed for
the possibility that, in the end, what Christians have long proclaimed could be
reconciled with the traditional hope of the Jews, and both could be proven correct.
Martin Buber, a leading Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century, put it in a slightly
different but similar way: “What is the difference between Jews and Christians? … We
all await the Messiah. You Christians believe that He has already come and gone, while
we Jews do not. I, therefore, propose we await him together. And when he appears, we
can ask Him, ‘So, were you here before?’ … I hope that at that moment I will be close
enough to whisper in his ear, ‘For the sake of heaven, don’t answer!’”3

For almost 2000 years, we Christians have tended to look at this Jewish refusal to accept
Jesus as the Messiah as a case of stubbornness, of theological pig-headedness, of an
obstinate denial of what is plainly obvious. We will point to the Scriptural texts that
would seem to speak about Him. Case closed. And, like many past generations of
Christians, we can find it hard to understand why it isn’t similarly clear to our Jewish
friends, when it is so eminently clear to us.

And, if they are familiar with their faith and with the Scriptures, our Jewish friends will
respond, respectfully but firmly, that, for every one of those prophecies that Jesus is
said to have fulfilled, there are others that He did not. Which will come as a shock to
many of us Christians. Our tradition has placed such great emphasis on Jesus’
fulfillment of Scriptural texts about the Messiah that we often assume it is all nicely and
neatly wrapped up and taken care of. But, as a Jewish person will tell you, there are too
many things that Jesus did not do during his earthly life, for them to be able to accept
that He is truly the biblically-promised Messiah.

Advent, however, is the season that (hopefully!) allows us to break through that
stalemate and actually speak to each other with respect and understanding. As
Christians, we have traditionally put so much emphasis on Jesus and what He has done
that we downplay, or ignore altogether, what He did not do, and what still remains to
be done. We can talk about redemption all we want, but at the end of the day, we have

2 As cited in Leon Klenicki and Richard John Neuhaus. Believing Today: Jew and Christian in Conversation
(Grand Rapids, MU: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 87.
3 As cited in Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp. 354-55.
to admit, if we’re honest, that our world still looks (and is) pretty “unredeemed” in
many ways. It would be easy to conclude that the coming of Jesus of Nazareth really
changed very little, at least to look at the surface. There is still far too much violence, too
much war, too much injustice and hatred and falsehood and division and intolerance
for us to see much of the face of the Messiah in the world around us. And, although it is
easy for us to theologize that away, we have to admit that it is a very serious objection—
not just for Jews, but for many Christians as well, who are struggling with how to
reconcile the reality of our world with the truth of their faith. As the Protestant
theologian Robert McAfee Brown observed: “The Jew laments: ‘Since the world is so
evil, why does the Messiah not come?’ The Christian wonders, ‘Why, since the Messiah
has come, is the world still evil?’”4 It is a very significant, and very real, question, and
one that we cannot easily skip over.

… Which is why Advent is both important and necessary. Advent is the season that
reminds us that, in so many ways, the Jewish people are right in their conclusions. There
are not clear, unambiguous signs of the Messiah’s coming that everyone can agree on. It
is simply not obvious in gazing around at our world—and surely the Messiah’s coming
will be something obvious and undeniable? Advent is the season that reminds us that,
for everyone that has happened, we still have a long way to go. We cannot be satisfied
to say that it has all been accomplished, that God has done everything He has to do.
Advent is the season that reminds us of the unfinished-ness of redemption, prods us
into remembering that the work of the Messiah is not yet complete, and that it is not just
the Jewish people who are waiting, watching and wondering; as Christians, we are doing
the same thing ourselves. The spirit of Advent, then, is an honest awareness of that
incompleteness, of the process that has begun but not yet finished, of a journey that we
are on together, but on which we have not yet arrived at our final destination. It is a
time of eagerness and anticipation, a time of hoping and longing, a time of knowing and
trusting. It is a time that cranes our necks as we peer toward the horizon, asking
ourselves, “Is this the year? is this the season? Is this the day?” In the same way that
every Jewish household sets aside a chair and a goblet at the Passover Seder each year
for the prophet Elijah, in case this is the year that he will come at last, to herald the
arrival of the Messiah. There is always that sense of uncertainty, tinged with a deeper
certainty, which is our confidence in the love and faithfulness of God which, even if they
seem slow sometimes, are nevertheless reliable and can be trusted. The spirit of Advent
is summed up so beautifully in one of the Advent prefaces for Mass: “Now we watch
for that day, hoping that the salvation promised us will be ours, when Christ our Lord

4See, for example, McAfee Brown’s Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy (Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1988), pp. 78-79.
will come again in his glory”. Or, as the priest says, at the end of the Our Father, “we
wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ”.

Advent is uncomfortable for all of us, because it reminds us of two difficult truths:
firstly, that the world is incomplete and unfinished and, therefore, that things are a bit
of a mess, and not quite as they should be. And of course, that incompleteness, that
unfinished quality, that messiness, applies not only to the world on the large scale, but
to each one of us personally as well. It is a reminder that we, too, are people who are on
a journey and who have not yet arrived, whose lives are frequently not as nice and neat
and tidy as we would like, as we ideally think they should be. It is a time when we
grapple with that which is unfinished within us, with all of the spiritual growth that we
know we probably should have done over the last year, the New Year’s resolutions that
we didn’t manage to keep, the Lenten observances that faded pretty quickly, or that, if
they survived until Easter, were quickly forgotten afterwards, no matter how spiritually
valuable they were. Needless to say, we often set impossibly high standards for
ourselves, and inevitably find ourselves discouraged that we were unable to accomplish
everything that we set out to do for ourselves.

Advent reminds us that that situation is not something that should shock, surprise or
disturb us greatly. Because the whole message of Advent is that “we ain’t there yet”.
The incompleteness in creation and redemption is mirrored in our own lives. We are
imperfect and in need of improvement and growth and transformation—just as our
world is. And yet, the message of Advent and, even more powerfully, the message of
Christmas, is that it is precisely into such a messy, apparently inappropriate and
horribly unworthy situation that the Son of God chose to become human, not spurning
the fact of that imperfection, but entering into it totally in the Incarnation. That is the
scandal—and the beauty—of the infancy Gospels that we will hear at Christmas, that
this child who was God did not pick a clean, sanitary modern hospital with all of the
necessary appliances, but chose a messy, probably smelly, cold and unsanitary stable, in
a tiny village, largely ignored by the Romans and the rest of the world. He came, not at
a moment of peace and stability, but when His own people were living under the
oppression of Roman rule, when there were flare-ups of violent rebellion all over the
land of Israel. Despite all the centuries of romantic artworks of Jesus being born into
scenes of great beauty, surrounded by a smiling Joseph and Mary, and beaming
shepherds, it was almost certainly not that nice and sweet and innocent and ideal—
quite the contrary. Things were a mess on so many levels. And yet, our faith tells us, it
was precisely into that situation that God deliberately chose to be born, which I think
can tell us something profoundly important about ourselves, and about how God may
be trying to work in our lives.
“First Coming”
(Madeleine L’Engle)

God did not wait ‘til the world was ready,

‘Til nations were at peace.
God came when the Heavens were unsteady,
And prisoners cried for release.
God did not wait for the perfect time.
God came when the need was deep and great.
God dined with sinners in all their grime,
Turned water into wine. God did not wait
Till hearts were pure. In joy God came
To a tarnished world of sin and doubt.
To a world like ours, of anguished shame
God came, and God's light would not go out.
God came to a world which did not mesh,
To heal its tangles, shield its scorn.
In the mystery of the Word made flesh
The Maker of the stars was born.
We cannot wait till the world is sane
To raise our songs with joyful voice,
For to share our grief, to touch our pain,
God came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!