We’re nearly at the end of Christmas season, and, if we’ve managed to stay focused on the season and not on all the busyness of the new year, we may be beginning to wonder where to put our attentions now. Traditionally tomorrow would be the time for the big party (the Twelfth Night that’s mostly only remembered now because of Shakespeare’s play). But what do we do today? The readings for the day are not much help. We’ll have sat with daily readings from 1 John 1 and Isaiah 8. This morning we might have read the next stage of the story of Ruth and, though we know where the story is leading, we’re not there yet. Boaz can’t step in as Ruth’s next of kin until he has given first right of refusal to another man. All round, it’s one of those odd, nothing sort of days that, really, are pretty common in the human experience.
But the now-and-not-yetness of the day is an apt way to near the end of this season. We have celebrated Jesus’ birth; we have proclaimed the king’s birth. But what now? Much like Ruth, hopeful that Boaz will come good, like Mary waiting to see what her child will do, we live much of our lives in this in-between world.
It’s also a common experience even when the thing for which we have been waiting arrives but proves to not be as we expect. We may be waiting for the relationship, the job, the child, the big career break, yet find that it isn’t completely fulfilling. Because nothing that we experience in this life is everything we hope for.
And this, I think, is why the Bible uses human marriage as a metaphor – and it does so many times in the readings for today. Because, much as the world of the Bible, and the world of today, may have seen marriage as the resolution to all tensions and longings, even this is not the final consummation of human longing. Marriages sometimes fail; and they always fail to fully satisfy. Yet they point to something key: our longing to be cherished, and to be perfectly united to another. This is not something we ever experience fully here in this life. So we live out the metaphor, and in its incompleteness await the real. Just as Jesus’ birth showed that God was fulfilling His promises, we all still live in wait for this fulfillment to be made known perfectly. We still wait for the final, full satisfaction of our longing in Him.
And so, on this eleventh day of Christmas, we wait. In hope. And we live in expectancy, however hard the wait may prove.
The Consolations of Writing 