Waiting on the other side of a door requires patience. Patience is a difficult gift to nurture in our society. We tend to want things and get things quickly. We will check to see why an email was not responded too quickly enough. We will order a book on line and wonder two days later why it is not here. We can make purchase in China with our laptops on our laps and a drive in the car gets us to places it took months to traverse only a few decades ago.
Patience in the face of the coming of Christ is not even that big a deal. I mean, we know Jesus came! Is this little reenactment we do in our liturgical cycles – charming and elegant as it is, not just re-enactment?
No, these reenactments remind us that we are set in a long and unfolding drama happening with us involved. The thing we forget is that the Birth of Jesus is the first of three comings. It occurred at a specific time and on a specific day. And the third coming will happen …well, somehow ….one day. Scriptures say there will be, well, significant drama. But the middle coming is the one Jesus does every day and every moment – with a friend who calls out of the blue, in meditation, with a song which brings a tear to an eye, with an awareness of goodness in the room.
Jesus is not on the other side of a door, locked against intruders or infidels or heretics. Jesus is on this side of the door, smiling, behind us, by about 3 inches.