AWAITING THE MESSIAH

Awaiting the Messiah

For many of us, December is chaotic and filled with busy preparations for Christmas. We run breathlessly through crowded shopping malls trying to find the perfect present to please every member of the family. We bake Christmas cakes, cookies and goodies. We dust off the boxes of decorations stored away in almost forgotten places and festively deck the house and string the lights on the tree. We struggle to write last-minute cards and holiday greetings to cherished friends. Each year it only seems to get more hectic.
As the shopping days decrease and our frantic pace increases, it is all too easy to lose sight of what these special preparations are meant for and to forget who it is we are getting ready to greet. Excitement fills the air and brightens our spirits as we hum snatches of Christmas carols, but our worries and the still-lengthy "To Do" list weigh heavily on us as Christmas approaches.
From chaos there emerges order and interior peace. During these hectic days, many Christian traditions celebrate the season of Advent [also called the “Winter Pascha” in some Orthodox traditions] as a reminder of whose coming it is that we are preparing for. Advent is designed to give us a spiritual orientation to the coming celebration and a time for reflection and interior preparation for it. Advent is a sort of spiritual "waiting room". The word "advent" comes from the Latin adventus, which means "coming" or "arrival". Throughout the Advent season we anticipate the coming or the arrival of Christ, the anointed one, the Messiah, our savior. The daily Scripture readings and meditations during this season focus on God's promise of salvation and the fulfillment of this promise in Jesus Christ.  In them we see a summary of salvation history.
Both the Advent season and the selection of Scripture readings are characterized by an attentive attitude, a posture of waiting. But a time of waiting is not just a period of mounting expectation, to be impatiently endured until the longed-for person or event arrives. It is an opportunity to set our sights on the promise, to hold fast to it, to consider its significance, to explore and fathom who and what it is that we are waiting for. The centuries that God's people spent watching and waiting in the Old Testament, longing and hoping for the day of redemption, are mirrored and even relived in our own interior waiting in the season of Advent. This waiting is not a passive whiling away of the days and hours, but a time when our appetites are whet, when our eagerness is honed to fine-edged anticipation, when we stand on tiptoe to catch the first glimpse of his coming.
Blessed John Henry Newman vividly expressed the spirit of this waiting in one of his sermons: "We are not simply to believe, but to watch; not simply to love, but to watch; not simply to obey, but to watch; to watch for what? For the great event, Christ's coming..."
 "I conceive it may be explained as follows - Do you know the feeling, in matters of this life, of expecting a friend, expecting him to come, and he delays?... Do you know what it is to be in anxiety lest something should happen which may happen or may not, or to be in suspense about some important event, which makes your heart beat when you are reminded of it, and of which you think the first thing in the morning.  Do you know what it is to have a friend in a distant country, to expect news of him, and to wonder from day to day what he is now doing, and whether he is well?  Do you know what it is so to live upon a person who is present to you, that your eyes follow his, that you read his soul, that you see all its changes in his countenance, that you anticipate his wishes, that you smile in his smile, and are sad in his sadness, and are downcast when he is vexed, and rejoice in his successes?  To watch for Christ is a feeling such as all these; as far as feelings of this world are fit to shadow out those of another.”