SOMEWHERE — sometimes deeply buried within the midst of the tinsel and sentiment, the surplus and indulgence — lies the deep joy of Christmas.
I don’t mind admitting that, since losing my father on Christmas Day two years ago, I’ve struggled to seek out my strategy to that joy. None the less, the enjoyment of Christmas waits to be found.
And, for me, one way or the other it’s within the waiting for Christmas to reach that I find my deepest joy within the Christ-child. If that sounds strange, so be it. As I wait patiently, I find my expectation grows; the promise is released in joy on Christmas Day.
Waiting for something, nevertheless, doesn’t necessarily have positive implications. Indeed, the medieval Anglo-French word from which we get “waiting” — waitier — could mean to observe with hostile intent. The word was closely related to gaitier, to be on one’s guard, or lie in wait for an enemy. From the 14th century, to attend had implications of “ambush” and “trap”.
In our own time, we appear to be prone to losing the positive power of waiting. Advent has turn out to be so overwhelmed by Christmas brought forward ever earlier into December, it barely registers as a season of prayerful restraint, attention, and watching. Even Advent calendars — which might offer helpful ways of focusing and waiting — have turn out to be, in our consumerist world, marked by indulgence; they often offer us (sometimes through a day by day shot of gin or piece of cheese) a foretaste of secular ideas of Christmas feasting.
Those of us who follow Christ, nevertheless, are called to attend alertly and expectantly for his arrival amongst us. Certainly, for me, Christmas seems weightless without the waiting. It is within the watching and waiting for the arrival of Christ at Christmas that we discover ourselves dwelling within the remarkable, pregnant, and holy space between the old world that’s passing away and God’s recent creation.
In Advent’s exquisite waiting, we now have a foretaste of the Kingdom that’s here and yet to return. Christina Rossetti’s line was “Love got here down at Christmas”; I would like to suggest that we savour this truth after we wait hopefully and expectantly; for all that the waiting might be frustrating, exhausting, and worsening — even for British people trained to attend in a queue — as we wait on, and for, Christ as Christmas approaches, we’re called into an important gift from God.
IN HIS classic study of Jesus, The Stature of Waiting, W. H. Vanstone suggests that waiting, theologically, is a present. It offers a strategy to dwell in love. To dwell within the stature of waiting is to trust within the dignity and freedom of one other. It involves not in search of to pursue motion in any respect times, but to let go of power.
Such loving restraint and hope entails humility, and a willingness to open ourselves to the prospect that we may not receive exactly what we hope for; we is perhaps surprised by unexpected horizons of affection, or we is perhaps hurt, betrayed, or let down.
George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch presents a classic example of this dynamic at work in human romance. The idealistic parson Camden Farebrother falls in love with blunt, strong-willed Mary Garth. Inexplicably, nevertheless, and yet very humanly, Mary prefers the essentially useless and feckless Fred Vincy.
Farebrother is left within the painful position — within the midst of his love, perhaps due to his love — of helping Fred to win Mary’s hand. Simply because Farebrother loves Mary, there isn’t any guarantee that such love will probably be requited. As Vanstone reminds us in his book on God’s love, Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense, “Where the thing of affection is actually an ‘other,’ the activity of affection is all the time precarious.”
The joy of Christmas lies, for me, in being invited to recognise this precarious but beautifully open and holy dynamic of affection at play at a cosmic level. As we, God’s people, wait on the arrival of the Saviour in our midst, he also waits on us with expectant and generous love. He invites us to trust that God will come and supply for his people; that he’ll bring forth the New Creation.
Like Simeon or Anna, who waited long to see the Saviour, or just like the Blessed Virgin Mary, who carried the long-expected guarantees of God’s salvation inside her in the shape of a baby, waiting is revealed to be a defining aspect of God’s way. Its stature has a divine warrant.
THE God who involves greet us at Christmas is, as much as any of us, formed in and with the body of one other. In the womb of Mary, Christ is woven into life. He is born as one among us, with nothing greater than the facility of a babe in arms; this power (if that’s even the right word) holds inside it no technique of compulsion.
All a baby can do is elicit a response. As we hold a newborn and look into their features, they call forth our love. Babies are utterly dependent and trusting beings; to survive, they have to call forth love from those on whom they depend.
From the outset, they’re within the hands of others who might reject, use, or abuse them. They reveal the precariousness of affection. It is a token of God’s profound trust within the operation of affection that Christ, as much as the remainder of us, begins his life in dependency.
In Vanstone’s words, “Love proceeds by no assured programme.” The God who empties himself into Christ comes as one who won’t impose himself on those whom he loves. He waits, but doesn’t compel.
It mustn’t surprise us that Christ got here into the world as one who serves. A one who serves can also be one who “waits upon”. Christ waits upon his people and upon the world. He does so without anxiety, or a have to prove himself. He is capable of inhabit the stature of waiting because he doesn’t need praise or affirmation. He simply shows us who God is and invites us to be and do likewise through him.
At Advent, we watch and wait with hope and expectation, but, most of all, with trust. God in Jesus Christ offers a love that has the shape of gift — of self-giving, of a life lived freely for others — and, since it is gift, it doesn’t demand or require reciprocity.
One may discover, nevertheless — as I and countless others have — that, in acknowledging and receiving the gift, one desires to make a response. Indeed, in Christ’s self-giving he reveals the likeness into which we’re called.
Waiting is revealed to be a token of letting go, of refusing the temptation to hunt control. In offering love, one trusts that that which is freely offered may as easily be refused. One might turn out to be that idiot who waits and never receives even a look. The servant Jesus Christ may not receive even a second glance from those whom he has come to like and serve.
Ultimately, the realm of Christ shouldn’t be the realm of right belief, and even right practice. It is true relationship, and right relationship has the character of gift. As we proclaim him Messiah, Prince of Peace, King and Son of God, at Christmas, we reply to the abundance of God’s self-offering.
God makes of himself, in Jesus Christ, the best gift, which unpicks every tangled and damaged thread of the universe and rethreads it with the hope and promise of affection and reconciliation.
The Ven. Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, within the diocese of Manchester.
