It’s Advent again. On the eve of this new church year, I locate the box with the wreath and candles and heave it off the top shelf of my bedroom closet, making a mental note to store it on a lower shelf next year. Unlike artificial evergreen wreaths, mine is made of hand-painted, kiln-fired clay, and it weighs as much as a gallon of milk. I’ve considered replacing it with a more traditional (and much lighter) wreath, but I can’t yet part with this proud accomplishment from a college ceramics course over a decade ago.
The remains of last year’s candles remind me that I forgot to buy new ones for this year, not surprisingly. I set up the ceramic wreath and what’s left of the candles in a prominent spot on a low bookcase in my living room. As festive as it looks, it’s the only hint of Christmas in the room, and it feels a bit sad and solitary. Kinda like me.
In the church calendar, Christmas always follows Advent; the coming of Christ always ends the wait. But it’s hard to go through the yearly rhythm of Advent and Christmas (and for that matter, Lent and Easter) when my own season of waiting stretches on without a visible end. Year after year I hope and pray, but the answer I want doesn’t come. It feels like Narnia before Aslan’s coming: always winter but never Christmas. Always Advent, always waiting, but never a Christmas miracle.
The object of my miracle is irrelevant—one thing I’ve learned after years of waiting is it’s not about the answer. It’s about the not-yet answered prayer, the tension of trusting that God is good when life screams that he isn’t. It’s about wrestling with how long God will let you be disappointed before he does something about it; how many times he’ll let your heart be broken before he heals it; and how many hopes and dreams will die and rot before he resurrects them.
I’m not alone in the wait. There are many in the pages of Scripture who know better than I how hard it is to pray without receiving an answer. In the Old Testament, Abraham and Sarah waited for a son. Joseph waited to be freed from an unjust prison sentence. The Israelites waited for deliverance from slavery in Egypt, then waited forty years in the wilderness to enter the promised land. David waited years to assume his kingship. Even the New Testament opens with Zechariah and Elizabeth waiting for a son—the one who would herald the coming Messiah, the fulfillment of all the hopes and prayers and waiting of the Old Testament.
But some of the bravest waiters of salvation history don’t get so much as a chapter or verse in the pages of sacred Scripture: the generations who lived during the four hundred years between Malachi and Matthew without a word from God.
At least their ancestors had the signs and wonders to pass on to their children: how God delivered his people from the hand of Pharaoh; how he fed them with bread from heaven and slaked their thirst with water from the rock; how he defeated their enemies and brought them into the promised land. For the Jews between the Old and New Testaments, all they had was the fading memories of those stories—and God’s continuing silence. Yet they too were mandated to tell their children and children’s children so they would not forget the miracles of the past, so they would remember to fear the Lord (Deuteronomy 6:20-25).
But what could they tell their children? ”The Lord once delivered our people from the hand of Pharaoh, and he has promised to send a Messiah, but he has been silent these past one hundred . . . two hundred . . . almost four hundred years . . .“
That God could be silent for so long toward his people is troubling. After centuries without a word from him, it’s astounding that there were any faithful Jews left waiting for God to fulfill his promise of sending the Messiah. I would’ve lost hope within the first few decades. Or years.
Yet in those four hundred years, did God stop loving his people? Did his silence mean he stopped listening to their prayers? Mary’s Magnificat affirms that God has mercy on those who fear him, in every generation (Luke 1:50). Even the generations who lived and died without hearing from him.
But how many of us struggle to believe that God loves us when he doesn’t break the silence of our still-unanswered prayers?
We know from Scripture that, despite all appearances, God did not forsake his people. The silence of centuries was broken by the cry of the Son, the ultimate Word from God, the Word made flesh. Yet the Scriptures still don’t give us an answer for why God was silent for that long, or why he let generations of his people pass away without seeing their hope of the promised Messiah fulfilled.
There is another time in Scripture when God was silent: the hours Jesus hung from the cross. No angelic messengers heralded the King of the Jews, like they did at his birth. The only answer to the Son’s suffering was darkness; the silence of Calvary was broken by the cry of the Son, breathing his last and sealing our redemption (Mark 15:33-34).
Did God’s silence mean his anger, whether towards his waiting people or his dying Son? This seems reasonable in the case of the Israelites, who throughout the Old Testament repeatedly turned away from God to worship idols. But what about the those who were faithfully waiting for their Messiah? Was silence a punishment for them? And what about the Messiah waiting hours of agony to be received back into his Father’s arms? Such silence in response to his children’s painful waiting seems less-than-fatherly, if not cold and distant.
But what if it’s the opposite—what if the silence is a reflection of God’s compassionate heart for his children? For what could the Father say, when his only begotten Son, his pride and joy, his very heart, hung bleeding and dying from a cross? It’s a wonder the universe didn’t wrack with cosmic sobs.
And what could the Father say to the Israelites, his beloved children, who had continually broken his heart and now were suffering in a spiritual wilderness of their own making, waiting for God to redeem them once and for all?
Sometimes silence is more profound than words. If we pause long enough from asking God why he hasn’t yet answered our prayers, maybe we would hear the tears that speak louder than any answer.
While I’ll continue to pray for an answer this Advent, I want to enter more deeply into the mystery of Christ’s coming to be God with us. He’s not a distant father or a faraway deity, indifferent to our suffering. He’s God with us in our prayers, God with us in our waiting, God with us in our pain and our tears and our whys.
And as wonderful as it would be for the waiting to end, the greater gift is the reality of the Word became flesh to feel my pain and suffer with me for as long as the wait takes. The incarnation doesn’t provide an explanation to God’s silence, or to our own pain and suffering in it. But it provides the answer we need: God is good. Even when our circumstances scream the opposite.
It’s the eve of the second Sunday of Advent, and I’ve just replaced the burnt-up candles on my wreath. I light the first one, though this single flame is inadequate to brighten the room. But rushing the season isn’t the answer; fast-forwarding to Christmas will deprive me of the opportunity to receive God with us in the wait.
As Advent continues, other flames will join it, pushing back the darkness with growing hope.
Come, Lord Jesus, at the end, Time’s end, my end, forever’s start. Come in your flaming, burning power. Time, like the temple veil, now rend; come, shatter every human hour. Come, Lord Jesus, at the end. Break, then mend the waiting heart.
Madeleine L’Engle, The Irrational Season
Life, Death, and Dance 