30 th November: 1 st Sunday in Advent

What are you waiting for?

Advent is the season in which the whole church joins together to focus on the task of waiting.

Not dull, impatient or absent-minded waiting, mind you, but passionate and intentional waiting.

The closing passages of the Old Testament include Malachi’s vision: ‘The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings’ (Mal: 4.2). Likewise, at the end of the New Testament we find St. John’s prayer: ‘Maranatha’, ‘O Lord, come!’ (Rev. 22.20). So, the closing words in both Old and New Testaments are texts of waiting: looking ahead with hopeful expectation to what God is going to do next.

The waiting of the biblical authors is always passionate: sometimes it’s full of hope and sometimes it’s full of anger and disappointment. There’s more than a hint of disappointment in our reading from Isaiah 64 where the author –clearly exasperated –cries out to God: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down’.

The image of the canopy of the heavens being torn open is a violent one. These words are spoken by a person who is frustrated; a person sick of waiting. The heavens are silent and God seems to have abandoned his post. Assurances of God’s love and God’s care seem hollow. It’s time for an honest outpouring of exasperation. And so the prayer that flows out is not one of praise and thanks, but one of complaint, of lament. Lament arises because a person’s trust is being tested; it doesn’t arise from an absence of faith altogether. Indeed, the author hangs onto a faith which says that God is one ‘who works for those who wait for him’ (64.4).

Often our only attitude toward waiting is impatience. Waiting signals dead time; lost time. We want the object of our desires to materialise, and we want it to happen here and now. Without doubt, times waiting can be full of dryness and despair. Yet, periods of waiting can be precious. Not all waiting is wasted time. After all, it may give us time to reflect. Time waiting is opportune for purging our lives of delusion. The restlessness and frustration of the wait can force us to go deeper; to refine our desires and reassess our priorities. It can encourage us to reflect on whether the objects of our desire are really worth the time and effort we devote them. Are we longing for that which will not ultimately satisfy? Is our desire honest and directed toward love, or is it naïve, clutching and selfish?

In waiting we come face to face with our own limitation because the task of waiting shows forth our dependence; it speaks of ways in which we are incomplete. It speaks of the impossibility of complete self-sufficiency. We wait because we need something or someone to help us, to console us, to supplement our efforts, to love us. We wait because we cannot solve all our problems on our own steam. This is a truth at the heart of our faith. We cannot save ourselves; we cannot heal our own wounds. We need a Divine physician. We need a community. We must wait for that which only another can give. No wonder we resist waiting so vehemently! No wonder we often resent it. Waiting confronts us with our limits, our lack of control, and our dependence. To wait is to be vulnerable and vulnerability is frightening.

The scriptures are characterised by stories of waiting, but so are our lives. I think of my newly married brother and his wife waiting for the birth of their first child. It was a time full of deliberate preparation, of excitement and anxiety for the whole family. I think of many single people clogging online dating websites waiting for love; waiting to find ‘that special someone’ with whom they might share themselves deeply and authentically. I think of the bedsides I’ve visited as a priest where people are waiting for death, sometimes full of regret, sometimes exuding a remarkable peace. To be human is to wait.

One of the most successful plays of the 20^th century was Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett. It premiered in 1953 and it struck a nerve with a culture traumatised by the fall-out of total war, with the rippling aftershocks of the holocaust and the atom bomb. The play speaks of the human condition where waiting occurs in the context of the desolations of history and an overwhelming sense of God’s absence. It has no plot, no readily visible movement or purpose, and no theme as such. What, then, was the secret of the play’s success: why did it attract such critical acclaim among audiences in the 1950s and 60s and up to our own day? The play’s main characters are two vagrants, whose conversation deals with the hardships of human existence and its loneliness. It alludes more than once to the attractiveness of suicide. Over the whole play the two homeless wanderers are waiting for a certain figure called Godot by the side of a road. The stage is empty all but for a single tree. Godot never shows up, but on two occasions, through a child messenger, we are told that he will arrive “tomorrow.” ¹

I wonder if the original hearers of Isaiah 64 shared some of these same sentiments that so appealed to war-weary European and American audiences watching Beckett’s play. At this stage of their history the people of Judah had suffered a number of calamites. They had been beaten in war, their Kingdom had been subjugated, their Temple destroyed, and the bulk of the artisans, officials and intellectuals had been deported, leaving the poorest of the poor to fend for themselves in a ravaged landscape. After a long period of exile hundreds of miles away –years of longing and waiting –a breakthrough had finally come. Their oppressors had been defeated and the dream of repatriation became reality. The joy of returning to the Holy Land was short-lived, however. There was friction between those returning and those who stayed. Land disputes and political instability was rife. What’s more the temple they managed to rebuild was nowhere near as impressive as the one that Solomon had built in times long past.

These were people who had a keen sense of God being ‘on their side’. They felt let down. And so the author cries out: ‘O that you would tear open the heavens and come down’. It seems that the people of God were waiting again just when they thought they had finally arrived. Yet, I think the text indicates that they are being refined by the very process of waiting. Isaiah 64 begins with the author wanting God to come down as a military hero; a warrior who comes with force to solve problems; destroy enemies, settle disputes and restore the kingdom to its former glory. Then there is a shift in emphasis, moving from a focus on God coming to magically solve problems to a heartfelt reflection on collective sin. Blaming God is not the answer: what is needed is an honest look at how the choices and priorities of the people themselves have created the present mess. Finally, there is a departure from the desire for a warrior God toward a God imagined as father and potter. What I see here is a progression in the author’s consciousness: a maturing of faith which could only have materialised in the context of frustrated waiting.

The other side of waiting is arrival. Just as Advent invites us to a come face to face with our waiting selves; to contemplate and befriend our restlessness, to purge the fantasies that corrupt our desires, it’s also a season to mark God’s arrival. We remember the past arrival of God in Jesus born of Mary. We look forward for the arrival of Christ the end of time to draw all things to a final peace. And we also look for the arrival of God in the church in the present moment by the Holy Spirit.

God is with us in the waiting and God is with us in the arriving. Advent is a time to wait passionately. For, when God arrives in our midst, God punctures the cruelty of history and places love at the centre. It’s an arrival that swamps our lives with the possibility of deep healing and lasting joy.

New Edition of Plato’s Republic

Plato, Republic, Books 1-5, LCL, 237. (Edited and translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy; Cambridge, MA / London: HUP, 2013. £15.95/€19.50/$24. pp. lxxxvii + 567. ISBN: 978-0-674-99650-2).

Plato, Republic, Books 6-10, LCL, 276. (Edited and translated by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy; Cambridge, MA / London: HUP, 2013. £15.95/€19.50/$24. pp. liii + 503. ISBN: 978-0-674-99651-9).

There have been a great many translations into English of this classic work of Greek philosophy – and, some would say, of literature. Earlier translators include Benjamin Jowett (1901), A. D. Lindsay (1907), F. M. Cornford (1941), D. Lee (1955), W. Boyd (1962), G. M. A. Grube (1974), A. D. Bloom (1991), D. C. Reeve (1992) and R. Waterfield (1998). In the twenty-first century, there have already been further new translations into English (G. R. F. Ferrari in 2000; R. E. Allen in 2006) as well as new editions of older versions. This version, by an Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies from the Open University (Emlyn-Jones) and a Retired Head of Classics from Oakham School (Preddy), is the first new edition in Loeb since Paul Shorey’s, which came out in the 1930s. The Loeb format of small, handy volumes with Greek and English on facing pages immediately sets them apart from the others, for ease of scholarly use. This new Loeb edition uses the Oxford critical text of 2003 by S. Slings. It is lightly annotated (more lightly than its predecessor), with introductions and indices of names and subjects. It is a lively version, which reads well, especially in the parts of snappy dialogue with short exchanges between characters. Sometimes it neglects details of the text unnecessarily, for example the Cave is described as ‘facing’ the light rather than as ‘open’ (ἀναπϵπταμένην) to it, the people shackled there are said to ‘face’ only forward, rather than to ‘see’ (ὁρᾶν) only forward – a detail of some pertinence in this vision-centred allegory (VII.514a-b). In general, the versions given often prefer literary flair in English to verbal proximity to the Greek. This is a loss for those who want to use the English as their primary scholarly text, but it is a gain for those who want to draw in the English reader through vivid use of vocabulary, such as the description of the young ‘aping’ (ἀπϵικάζονται) their elders and the old men ‘humoring’ (συγκαθιέντϵς) them with banter and ‘wisecracks’ (χαριϵντισμοῦ) (VIII.563a). The updating of the Loeb edition in both Greek and English is much to be welcomed.

JANE HEATH

Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University