God’s Time; Our Time
Sister Elise Saggau, OSF
When we deliberately turn our lives more fully and freely toward God and the things of God, we discover that we are loved, that God is always on the way to us, practically running. This, of course, is what Advent and Christmas are about. “Look,” says the Song of Solomon, “look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills” (SoS 2:8). Take another look. He is not wearing a judge’s robes, but the garments of a bridegroom. This coming is for us, for our becoming, for our growth in love.
God comes to show us who we are. When God comes among us, God even looks like us. God does not look scary. We hear the words “do not be afraid.” Who could be afraid of a poor little baby lying in a manger? We don’t have to pass any tests; we don’t have to be afraid of failing. However, we do have to make space for God. We have to offer our emptiness, our poverty, our inadequacy as a place where God can work. In other words, we have to “be ourselves,” the selves that God always intended, the selves that God loved from the very beginning.
Sounds simple, right? However, there is something in us that resists this reality. A warning voice sounds from deep within us: “Look out; you might lose something! Something might be taken away from you! You won’t be ‘in charge’ anymore.” Or “What am I going to get out of this?” When we read the Gospels through to their ending, sure enough, we realize that what began as a charming scene in a stable at Bethlehem ends with death on a cross and an apparent disastrous human failure.
We do not usually think of the cross in connection with Advent and Christmas. Yet the crib and the cross cannot be separated. We were signed at our Baptism with the sign of the Cross, not the sign of the manger! The Cross is the powerful sign of God’s complete self-giving for our sake. We cannot get beyond this. At its most fundamental level, the sign of the cross is the fundamental sign of hope.
And Advent is a season of hope. It is precisely where crib and cross come together. From the stable in Bethlehem, there is a long and arduous road to Jerusalem where a cross awaits. But the cross is not the end of the story, just as Bethlehem was not really the beginning. From the first moment of creation, God envisioned coming among us as a poor human being. At Bethlehem, that plan took concrete bodily form in the person of Jesus Christ. On Calvary that plan was brought to fruition in the complete self-surrender of Jesus Christ who thus revealed to us the amazing reality of what God is really like. In the Resurrection, the story exploded, so to speak, releasing the unimaginable power of God’s Spirit throughout the whole created universe. Thus, we are all part of a continuing drama that goes on till the end of time. Johannes Metz, says:
We can never say that we have been born too late. We can never say that we missed God’s coming, for our awesome encounter with God still lies ahead of us. In a real sense, the “holy night” of Christ’s coming still lies ahead for our world. . . . If we are open and receptive, then we truly are people in waiting, advent creatures who allow God to approach them and look forward to His coming. Instead of relegating God to a distant past, we look for God in our own future.
“Look, look, he comes, leaping upon the mountains, bounding over the hills.” The bridegroom is on the way, coming for our “becoming,” coming for our growth in love, coming to show us who we are. Let us go out to meet him, rejoicing. Let us begin, for now it is God’s time; now it is our time.
