A Space for Waiting
Stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing
near! (Luke 21:28b)
Where is God when you need him? In José Saramago’s horrific novel Blindness a man pulls up at a traffic light and suddenly, unexpectedly completely loses his sight. Over the next weeks the plague randomly strikes one person after another; the government’s attempts to contain the epidemic are ineffectual as soldiers, doctors and officials lose their sight. Society collapses; bands of the helpless blind roam the streets looking for food. Yet one person, an eye-doctor’s wife, is inexplicably spared. She is the one sighted person left on earth. With great courage she devotes herself to caring for the blind, leading her husband and friends through horrendous scenes she alone can see. Near the story’s end she enters a church; like every public building it is crammed with the starving, filthy sightless seeking shelter. Above and around them, what she alone can see is that in every painting, someone, before going blind himself, has painted across the eyes; to every statue, even the one of the man nailed to the cross, someone had fastened a bandage covering the eyes. All the sacred images in the church are blind, as blind as the hopeless humans they overlook. The doctor’s wife describes what she sees to her husband; he says “that priest must have committed the worst sacrilege of all times and all religions, the fairest and most radically human, coming here to declare that…God does not deserve to see.”
Can we in any sanity hope for a God who sees our world as it is and sets it aright? A God whose goodness can be vindicated, despite everything? Or has God finally given up on us? To answer “yes” is, no doubt, for us to give up on God. This is the question for Advent. Despite everything, can we hope for deliverance; at this late date can the promise “Your redemption draws near!” be anything but empty?
The same questions would have haunted the crowds Jesus speaks to in the grounds of the Temple in Jerusalem. What he said must have been as strange to them as it is to us. Jesus, of course, speaks in the language of Jewish Apocalyptic: “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” I grew up hearing this sort of text through a wooden literalism, as making straightforward though bizarre predictions about future cosmic events, a kind of biblical science fiction about the “end of the world.” But this is the standard way for Hebrew prophets to talk about the great historical events God works by way of Israel. Jesus’ audience, unlike later generations, knew not to take the metaphors literally. The language is poetic, but as Marianne Moore said, imaginary gardens can contain real toads; plain truth inhabits metaphorical extravagance. Wonders in the heavens represent world-changing events on the ground, in the socio-political and military fortunes of Israel and the nations.
Jesus’ words shocked in his all too literal predictions about the city in which he stood: he announces not, it seems, the fulfillment of Israel’s messianic longings, the imminent vindication of Israel by God, but the opposite: defeat and desolation. Jerusalem will be besieged and the Temple destroyed: not one stone left upon another. Holy Jerusalem and its Temple, the very sign and symbol of God’s presence with his people, will be reduced to ruin. This is an extraordinarily inappropriate way to proclaim that God oversees the course of events, that God’s kingdom is at hand, that redemption approaches. His audience looks in hope for a messiah appointed by God to lead them to victory over their oppressors; instead they hear their defeat announced by the man they hoped would be that messiah. The people of Israel look to their God to overpower their adversaries; all Jesus offers them is powerlessness. Immediately before today’s lesson Jesus tells them they will see Jerusalem besieged, but they should not take up arms in eager expectation of God’s great battle, the final victory prophesized in Zechariah. Instead, it will be the time to head for the hills, to flee, not fight. He tells them that Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles, her people put to the sword, captured or exiled. He tells them the vindication of God lies ahead: the Son of Man will come in power and glory but there’s no way to it except God’s way, the way that insists on our powerlessness.
Consider where Jesus stood, uttering his apocalyptic prophecies there in the Temple precincts; where as a first century Jew he inevitably saw himself located: At the center of the world, Israel, God’s land of covenant promise, the nation of kings and priests, the light to the nations. At the center of Israel, Jerusalem, the holy city, city of God’s peace. In the center of Jerusalem, the Temple, the sign of God’s presence on Earth. In the center of the Temple the Holy of Holies, in the center of the Holy of Holies the ark of the covenant, on each side of it a cherubim and between them…an empty space. No idol, no discernible deity, just the emptiness, the sign of the God who is present when and where and how he chooses, the God not of our making, not in our control, the God who does not endorse our dreams of empowerment and security but who comes to us in our helplessness. It is most often under the aspect of powerlessness that God chooses to fill that space, to make himself known to us. He comes to us as a helpless infant, born in a backwater, and under suspicious circumstances. As Jesus man of sorrows, companioned with the unwanted, having no place to call his own. As failed messiah, rejected, betrayed, accused, dumb before his interrogators, helpless, put to shameful death, and unceremoniously disposed of by the managers of the world’s piety and power.
In Advent we take our places with Jesus in that powerlessness. Our call is to focus on the fact that we yet wait for the coming of the God who saves. We don’t much care for waiting. Maybe men especially; make me wait and you make me mad. (Just ask my wife.) For waiting is about not being in control. The helpless frustration of waiting in airports, waiting for test results, waiting for delayed loved ones, waiting in hospital waiting rooms, waiting in traffic…our impotence made too plain; we can do nothing to make happen what we need to happen. Having to wait injures pride: make me cool my heals, make me get in line, put me on hold, that reminds me I’m not in charge, that my power does not avail.
In Advent we examine ourselves. We ask whether we can still believe in God’s goodness, so long denied and delayed. Like the people of Jesus’ Jerusalem we look for God’s vindication, for some surety that God cares, God saves, God sees. Sometimes the time of waiting is rich in expectation; we’re gifted with hope in the coming kingdom, we almost see redemption dawning. But as often we wait for explanations not forthcoming, for hints of God’s power at work in this world, if only behind the scenes, at the controls of some subtle cosmic plan in which everything makes sense, and everything is for the best. Easy answers worn away, we find ourselves helpless, waiting, mostly bereft of a satisfactory accounting. Nothing of much weight to say to those who, like José Saramago, gesture toward a world that seems empty of any God worth knowing and reject the possibility of a God who casts a merciful eye on humanity’s travail.
And yet…it’s possible we’ve got things a bit backwards. As we live into these silent, empty spaces in which we wait on God maybe the questions that should press upon us are not those we ask and God does not answer. Maybe what to listen for are the questions God puts to us here and now, in the time of waiting, in the Advent time of his apparent absence. I think the Son of Man, resurrected, glorified and vindicated by God even now divests himself of his power. I think Jesus steps back to make a space for us, asking us to take his place, to be his presence is an otherwise godforsaken world. The man on the cross might see but have in infinite humility chosen to do so though our inconstant eyes. Returning home to peaceful, rural New Hampshire after a visit to New York City, Jane Kenyon wrote:
After three days and nights of rich food
and late talk in overheated rooms,
of walks between mounds of garbage
and human forms bedded down for the night
under rags, I come back to my dooryard,
to my own wooden step.
At the Cloisters I indulged in piety
while gazing at a painted lindenwood Pieta --
Mary holding her pierced and dessicated son
across her knees; but when a man stepped close
under the tasseled awning of the hotel,
asking for "a quarter for someone
down on his luck," I quickly turned my back.
Now I hear tiny bits of bark and moss
break off under the bird's beak and claw,
and fall onto already-fallen leaves.
"Do you love me?" said Christ to his disciple.
"Lord, you know
that I love you."
"Then feed my sheep."
(“Back From The City,” in The Boat Of Quiet Hours, 1986)
Rowan Williams wrote that God the Father is not shown in the world in acts of power, but only in Jesus (Resurrection, pp. 85-6). But then in what acts of power is Jesus shown in this world? Perhaps not in acts of power, but only in our small acts of faith and love done in his name.
Amen.