Emerging as we are from a contentious election, we are moving from the season of promises made to the season of promises kept, or so we hope. And liturgically, poised on this final Sunday of Advent with Christmas only a few days ahead, we are following the same trajectory.
Advent has set before us the very long story of God’s promises, first made in the creation itself, of a future when all would be brought to completion. Since we human beings are key protagonists in the story, there have been a lot of ups and downs. Only God has remained steadfast. Stubborn, really, when we consider the many and quite inventive ways that we and our forebears have found to thwart the divine plan for our greatest good.
The promise has remained in place through it all, growing in depth and richness with the passage of time. Come Christmas, we will celebrate the promise kept—but how oddly! No sign of the victorious warrior or the glorious king of peace that the prophets have led us to expect. Instead, a newborn cradled in his mother’s arms beside a cradle full of straw, with ox and ass looking on with interest. Yes, there are choirs of angels out over the fields of Bethlehem, but their song is brief and apparently unheard except by a handful of shepherds. Yes, eventually there arrive exotic foreign sages with gifts fit for a king, but they don’t stay long. Yes, Simeon and Anna identify the six-week-old brought to the Temple by his parents as the promised redeemer, but no one seems to have paid much attention except Mary and Joseph. Then it’s on to an unreported life of exile off in Egypt, followed by an equally unmentioned life as a village carpenter in Nazareth. What sort of promise keeping is this?
This is God’s promise keeping, and it unfolds with God’s slow patience through Jesus’ private years and public ministry, still bearing very little resemblance to warrior or monarch. Or so it seems. It would take the early believers long pondering, and later believers long theological arguing, to discover that a battle really was fought during those years, a battle that came to a climactic victory in Jesus’ death and resurrection. But, as we will see during the Easter season, it was a victory without fanfare, victory parades, ticker tape, or endless crowds gathered around the risen Savior, yelling questions and getting sound-bite answers to be broadcast all over the world. And there was still no sign of throne or crown beyond the cross and crown of thorns whose hidden transformation is sung only obliquely in psalms whose vocabulary is as old as King David’s time and after. Awash with political fury, murder in the streets, hints of unsettled times still to come, and all under the cloud of a worsening pandemic, we may find it hard to see how the promise has been kept.
Ah, but it has not been fully kept, not yet. Next year, when Advent begins, we will be reminded once again that the Savior’s triumph over the forces of sin and death is still a work in progress in the history of the world, and perhaps even the cosmos. The victory was decisive, but, in our human way of reading history, the aftermath will be an unknown time settling until Christ comes again in glory.
Fortunately, we are not called to explain this continuing paradox of the already but not yet. Traditionally, we call it characteristic of the season of Advent, but in reality it is always with us. We are not called to explain it, but we are called to live it, with no other light to see by than the one that burned largely unnoticed in Bethlehem, remained unrecognized in the Temple except by two oldsters, and lit the unsung lives of the first believers and all of us who have followed them since the resurrection. It shines still, even in our present darkness, visible only to the eyes of faith.
May your Christmas be bright with God's promise!
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