The Obedience of Advent

When He came into the World He said, “Behold I come to do your will.” Hebrews 10:5;7

Are we nearly there? Some homes are full of children brimming with excitement. Others are just jaded with weeks of anticipation. We have gone through Black Friday and Cyber Monday and goodness knows what. Office Christmas parties and school plays and lunch club Christmas lunches all the other anticipations of Christmas make almost any assertion of the need to keep Advent seem out of touch at best, and at worst, so stubbornly insensitive most people’s experience that we are making ourselves irrelevant by hanging on to the purple and the restraint and saying ‘yes, we are nearly there, but we are not there yet.’

We are very nearly there: but not quite yet! The Christ Child is with us: His incarnation began when He took flesh in His mother’s womb. Nine months ago on Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March we celebrated his coming to earth. Angels in Nazareth; the unexpected fulfillment of ancient prophesy: The Virgin is with child and will bear a Son. Since then, for those with eyes to see, the signs of His coming have been gathering.  A confluence of stars has caused wise men to begin a journey to the West. Meanwhile a great stir in the house of the Aaronic priesthood as an elderly and childless couple find that they too are the subjects of angelic attention and Elizabeth in her old age has conceived a son. Nearly – but not quite. And we are called to be obedient to the waiting. Why? Why wait? Because the obedience and the waiting itself has a purpose, and brings us to Christ.

In this time of anticipation a community is forged of those who share the waiting. It is a bit like when a group of people are waiting for a bus that has been delayed, or more awfully when someone flies a drone and everyone is stuck at the airport. Rather than hurrying onto the next thing people who are waiting are forced together and they begin, horror of horrors, to talk, communicate and form a community.

The obedience of waiting, and it is obedience to wait, because everyone else has rushed forward and is already celebrating Christmas, helps to forge community.

The text which we are given today from the epistle to the Hebrews is the classic text of obedience. On coming into the world the Lord says, not: "I am coming to do my own thing", but “I come to do your will.” What Christ will do in His incarnation is the will of the father. He will be obedient.And what we are to do as those who seek to serve and follow Him, is similarly to be obedient. 

Obedience seems to run so counter to our culture which emphasises choice and free will that even to pray the Lord’s prayer, “thy will be done” is a deeply rebellious thing to do. In Religious communities, communities of monks and nuns, the Rule is a spiritual tool. Fr Congreve once wrote, “we are not to be disappointed when the Rule hinders or checks us in some work. If it develops the surrender of our will it develops God’s glory in us, and that is worth more than the work would have been.” The Rule of the professed religious is simply a distillation and focus of how all the Baptised are to live. This insight is for us all. 

People like me who rejoice in being busy and who are always distracted from the thing in hand by the thing which is to come, this call to the obedience of waiting, of recognising that when we are hindered from getting on we are in fact being called back to Christ is a profoundly necessary reminder.

Here we are on the fourth Sunday of Advent being told that we must still wait. We want to get on with it, but we are called to be obedient to the will of God: so that He may make us one with Him who came into the world to do his Father’s will.

This waiting in obedience which leads us into community with those others with whom we wait challenges us to live differently. We are to serve others and not ourselves.

As Fr Congreve also wrote: “obedience keeps nothing to itself, no sphere of nature in which self is to remain… I wish to have no thought, no delight, no sorrow, no hope which I cannot share with my brothers in Jesus Christ.” The obedience of the Christian is to love others whom God loves with God’s love.

This is surely an expression of what in a shadow form is meant when people speak about “the Christmas spirit.” It is the call to generosity; to giving rather than receiving, to living for others in the community which is forged when together we wait obediently on the Lord.

Fr Congreve also said: “where each goes his own way there is not really any community but a collection of lonely and selfish individuals.” When at last we are there, and the feast comes, and the waiting is over, we shall remember that we are still waiting for his second coming in glory. And in our obedient waiting for the second coming of the one who was Himself obedient from the moment he came into the world, then we shall find that our waiting is joyful and is itself an anticipation of the heaven for which we yearn.

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