In all honesty, the season of Advent rarely takes center stage in most Christian’s lives. The idea of waiting for Jesus to come at Christmas or the end of the world is a tough sell. The average person who has a family or job or is in school experiences the month of December as one of the busiest, if not the busiest, months of the year.
Sure, there is some acceptance of waiting, as the Church recommends. Still, in reality, the average Christian who doesn’t live in a monastery or a hermitage will probably spend little time waiting while working to finish the tasks of Christmas, leaving the “waiting” in the corner to be packed away as soon as December 24th wraps up the season officially.
You can’t blame Christians too much because the forces against the Christian principle of delayed gratification have not only won the war but continue to occupy the minds and hearts of their cultural subjects. The pagan principle of satisfying a desire immediately is juvenile and unhealthy but desirable. It works to dull the senses so sufficiently that the rationale of spending any energy on an ethereal thought such as the meaning of ‘waiting,’ as did the ancients, is entirely out of the question.
It doesn’t mean the question isn’t there. It simply means it is never addressed. Like the elephant in the room that is unnoticed, modern culture continually ignores the dependence all human beings have on God. The ancients spoke clearly and often about their inadequacies, failings, and need for a messiah to save them. We know they waited patiently for generations and were even skeptical when he finally came in a way they never imagined. Skepticism of old has been displaced with the arrogance of human achievement.
We no longer live in times like our ancestors; the modern mind does not cry out to the heavens begging God to descend and fix the problems they cannot. Oh no, the modern mind has come up with a gimmick far better than pleading and waiting. Create your messiah.
Indeed, the new omniscient gods called medicine, technology, and artificial intelligence answer immediately to requests without delay. The minute I have discomfort, healthcare is there to save me with some new pill or procedure. When wanting to know Hamlet’s author, Google never disappoints. If changing a light bulb in a car seems tricky, YouTube comes to the rescue.
Plenty of people don’t seem to have the aching need as their forefathers to have some mystical being save them. The lack of church attendance attests to that fact. No matter how advanced we become, we are forever linked by our common humanity with our ancestors. And as they felt the utter dependence on God, the modern mind will too, when the veneers of their created messiah flake away, exposing the same emptiness the shepherd in the field experienced two thousand years ago.
It usually creeps up in silence and without warning. One day is pretty much like the rest, and the next, a lump in my throat that wasn’t there before. After summoning all the medical messiahs available, their response is neither adequate nor soothing. Perhaps for the first time, there is a gaping hole that can only be filled by the true Messiah.
Plenty of elephants are in the room to go around. Long before the life and death experience are elephants of estrangement. There are so many strained and ruptured relationships out there right now. Child against parent, sibling against sibling, husband against wife, and the list goes on endlessly. Those whom we claim to have loved are now our enemies. If there isn’t a gaping hole that can only be fixed with God’s love and reconciliation, then there is no such thing as a gaping hole. Only a few get on their knees and bombard heaven with their prayers as their last resort because no human messiah can fix it—only the real one.
No matter how advanced or modernized humanity becomes, the need for a Messiah will never cease. Thank God we have Advent to wake us from slumber and remind us of that.
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