What it Means to Wait

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
    and in his word I put my hope.
I wait for the Lord
    more than watchmen wait for the morning,
    more than watchmen wait for the morning. 

O Israel, put your hope in the Lord,
    for with the Lord is unfailing love
    and with him is full redemption.
He himself will redeem Israel
    from all their sins.

Psalm 130:5-8

In July this year, after a long struggle with illness, our neighbour and friend passed away. She was, as they say, a character; over the preceding eight years, she’d been a glorious phenomenon in our lives, utterly herself and always surprising. Without us quite understanding how, she had endeared herself to our family and become part of the rhythm of things. Life had not been kind, and she’d become a battler. If she was fierce in her dislikes, she was even fiercer in her loyalty to friends and her concern for the underdog. And though she’d suffered the most egregious wounding in the context of Christian community, she was a woman of persistent faith. “I watched Hour of Power on Sunday”, she told Jannah one week; “I got a hell of a lot out of it!”

Faith in God and friendship were the main reasons she’d overcome her addiction to alcohol, itself an initial attempt to overcome deep pain. Having suffered profoundly in body and in spirit, it would have been explainable if she had succumbed again to drink or worse. Even though full of tedium, each day was marked by God’s grace. For there were many ways in which she might have died before her time—it’s not too strong to say that her later life was menaced by despair. We had the privilege of journeying closely with her through her final illness. The night after she’d passed, we visited her one final time in the hospital morgue, honouring her lifeless body for its final faithfulness to God’s gifts. And a sense of wonder remains with me still: after long waiting and watching, she won through. To die in God’s time with living hope, and not die by her own hand, or in the enslavement of addiction, or on the back of a motorbike, was a victory. She had won through to a natural death, and the door to God’s own country.

“Hope”, writes Oliver O’Donovan “stands out dramatically in its true colours when the possibilities for anticipation run out, leaving no prospect but death, so that nothing is left to hold onto but the promise.” Our friend had been a nurse, and so she had no trouble anticipating death as a possibility, even as her body fought on. But what stands out now is her hope. I now see she waited and endured not because she anticipated death, or because she wished for better in the meantime, but because through his promise of life God had put hope within her reach. And it seems to me that that hope did not disappoint her (Romans 5:5) but worked in her life like the chain of an anchor, often mostly submerged yet holding her fast amidst the rising and falling of her days.

Most of us would, I suspect, hear O’Donovan’s words not as an encouragement but as a negation of the life we’re working so hard to make happen. The best we can aspire to in the end is to hold on to a promise—that’s what he seems to be saying. There are many, many dark moments in the life of the world. And into our own small lives such moments also come, moments when “the possibilities for anticipation run out”. But I wonder if, like me, you would feel impatience or even exasperation if, in such a moment, another said to you: “Take heart! There is hope! Wait for the Lord.”. “Wait for the Lord”, urges the Psalmist, “be strong and take heart/and wait for the Lord”. Wait for the Lord? When enemies are real, when fear seeks to take a hold, when death comes close, what on earth is the point of waiting?

As creatures in time, we learn—more or less—to wait. I say learn; for most of us, it’s perhaps more honest to say we put up with delays—we suffer the passage of time. We “wait” for the train, for the bus, for the holidays to come, for the kids to get to school-age, for our much-deserved promotion, for retirement. Such things are the anticipations of one or other life-story. And anticipation is not unreasonable, for the future is veiled to us, and the deliberations that help us live forward in time are animated by such storied expectations. But for the life of mere anticipation, to “wait” is simply to agree that our decisions involve a degree—sometimes a large degree—of delay. It can’t be helped, we tell ourselves: we’d best put up with it, “we’ll just have to wait”.

Typically, what stands behind our anticipations and our impatient waiting is belief in a self who does things. For us late moderns, the essence of living is our own action. The future, we hum to ourselves, is ours! On this telling, the big story of my life is autobiography: is self-determined, self-voiced, self-concluded narrative. We’re here to “make the most of it”, to chase down whatever it is we intend to “get out of life”. Even the prospect of death we approach with hearty defiance, making it an occasion for one grand, final, project for the self: the fabled bucket list. And in suffering, in helplessness, we find ourselves scrabbling: there must be something we can do. Unwilling to wait for anything but the restoration of our powers, we fret and chafe. Thus, despair shadows the steps of self-belief.

In this context (if my caricatures here are near enough the mark), it makes sense that the Psalmist’s urging to “wait for the Lord” should at best sound pathetic, the pacifying, delusional hand-pat of religion that lacks the guts to face reality. Reality is indeed in question. Is the story of a self-determined life actually aligned with reality? Does it adequately account for our abiding sense that life is inherently meaningful, that is: possessing meaning that is large, exceeding ourselves, overflowing the bounds of our understanding? Does it really enable lives marked by a sense of responsibility, of answerable significance? Can it really make sense of the dignity and strength of our friend’s endurance in life and in death? And can it make sense of faith in Jesus, and of waiting in hope? Well no, it cannot. As long as my life remains founded on the fictional sufficiency of my own action, Christian faith—the testimony that God in Jesus has definitively acted to rescue me, rescue you, from evil, sin and death—can only dwindle to become something-I-tell-myself-when-I-feel-a-bit-low. And as for waiting—waiting “for the Lord”—well, when I need it, that’s just a nice centering thought.

Let us wrestle with this, whether we are living unreal, unfaithful lives. Let us countenance the possibility that we were, in fact, never “enough”. And let us instead put our trust in the far more wonderful news that our small lives can, by the sheer gift of God, be truly secured, truly anchored. In our spiritual blindness, let’s hear addressed to us also Jesus’s question: “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” (John 9:35). When we hear this, when we allow ourselves to be drawn into rapport with Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us, a living trust—what we call faith—is given room to grow. And faith lays our lives open to the future: not the future of our mere anticipation, the future of our imagining and our anxiety, but of the knowledge of life with God, life in abundance, life victorious over death. With the gift of God’s holy spirit, God’s own life within us, we notice the fruit of a new way of being. Sin no longer dominates us. Old habits are killed off for good. Even more profound, our hearts change: we forgive, we think in new ways, we love others, we give thanks to God. All of these are just tasters, tasters of the resurrection life to come.

It is because of this reality, this actual, new state of affairs, that faith knows to wait: to wait for the Lord. Of course, faith looks like action! Famously, faith without works is dead, and some of those works see us busy and doing, testifying with our words and our actions that Jesus is risen, that the Holy Spirit is blowing across the troubled face of the earth, that the Church bears witness in her life to God’s reign, and to the suffering Saviour. Watchful and alert faith responds to the now! of God’s kingdom: the now of the Messiah, the now of Christmas. For each of us we learn to know and respond to that now: now is the time to repent; now is the time to forgive; now is the time to bless, to act, to follow.

But faith also learns to wait; that too is one of the works of faith. We’ve fallen out of love with ourselves. We’ve renounced the dark powers that determined the horizon of our ambitions, that shaped our anticipation of the future, that played havoc with our bucket lists, and left us with despair—we’ve renounced them in Jesus’s name! We now know: salvation, rescue, “the most” in life, is God’s: it all lies within God’s gift, it’s all God’s doing, it’s all received on his terms. After all, how else can a creature have life? It’s God himself who redeems us from all our sins. And so faith, which is “sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see” waits for the Lord (Hebrews 11:1): in worship, in awe, in loving trust, it stands back to make room for God to do what only God can do.

In that space of waiting, hope, which is already certain, dawns on us, grows in us, and becomes ours. It blossoms within us as a certainty, bestowing beauty on the hopeful. It rises over our lives like the morning, becoming the horizon of all our small deliberations, the bright thread through our suffering. It is, as the writer of Hebrews puts it, an “anchor for the soul, firm and secure”, fixed for us within “the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where Jesus, who went out before us, has entered on our behalf” (Hebrews 6:19-20). This is the hope of all who trust in God, the hope that Job—long, long ages before the Advent of the Christ—gives astonishing voice to:

I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God.
I myself will see him with my own eyes—
I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!

Job 19:25-27

Christian faith is a waiting faith: this side of the promised resurrection, we’re called to live all our life in faithful waiting. We know our Redeemer has indeed stood upon the earth, such that our first sisters and brothers in the Lord saw him with their own eyes. Even so, we join with the confidence of Job that though our bodies are destroyed by death we nevertheless will, in resurrected bodies, see God. Of this the gift of the Holy Spirit and God’s saving works among us now reassure us.

To wait, then, is to testify with our lives about what is really real. We are not enough, praise God! Our lives are not “our own” anymore; we’re no longer under the rule of darkness, but we’ve been “bought at a price”, redeemed from slavery (1 Corinthians 6:20; Colossians 1:13). This hope that now grows within us, that now defines our existence, is a “living hope”, the promise of “an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade” (1 Peter 1:3-4). And so Christians find they have the guts not just to face death, but also to declare that love wins, that human lives are, with God, of lasting significance, that life is abidingly meaningful, that heaven has good news for all humanity. With all this, I think again of our friend, and our last visit with her. There was nothing beautiful about that hospital morgue. It smelled of chemicals. There was a good deal of stainless steel about the place. Our friend’s body was waxy, her hair thin over her high forehead. But all this finality, this picture of “I-made-it-despite-everything”, only spoke to us of the hope she knew, how God’s love endures right to the end—and on into the promised life to come.