The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.
Waiting makes up a great percentage of our lives. Waiting in lines, waiting for the mail, waiting for exam results, waiting for a check for services rendered. Some of this waiting is unavoidable; life isn’t instantaneous. But waiting is avoidable if our brains are operative – as when I was to wait for my wife at a precise hour at a downtown intersection in Oakland where her associate would drop her off from a workshop in Santa Cruz. One, two, three hours went by and no wife. So why didn’t I track down her driver on my cell phone? I didn’t have one! In despair I finally decided to drive away when my wife appeared in my side view mirror running down the sidewalk after me. Her driver had deposited Jane at the correct time but at an intersection a block away – so that both of us waited three hours for each other. (Please, Tom Haeuser, reserve you comments.)
Advent plays upon our waiting for God to intervene in our world, in our lives. We are told to be ready. Indeed we plead with God to “rend the heavens and come down.” This Sunday’s readings tell us to lay out a smooth path (within our minds and souls) to facilitate God’s rapid redemptive arrival among us. We are told to stay awake for he could come at any time. John the Baptist plays the herald’s role. All serves to set up great expectations among us.
Which reminds one of Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. It’s all about a poor orphan named Pip who in the opening scene provides food and drink to an escaped convict. The convict is recaptured and Pip returns to his sister’s home. Then surprise enters his life. A lawyer comes to announce “great expectations” when Pip comes of age. Pip thinks the mysterious source of his “great expectations” is Miss Havisham, an old, wealthy, once jilted bride with whom he keeps company on occasion. And indeed, when he does become a young man, he is brought to London where the lawyer trains him to become a gentleman to befit his guaranteed bright future.
Then one stormy night, amid wind and rain, Pip hears footsteps on the stairs below his flat. Slowly emerging from the darkness of the stairwell there appears a man of sixty, roughly dressed, strong on his legs, browned and hardened by exposure to weather – holding out both hands to Pip. “Pray, what is your business?” asks Pip. “My business? Ah! Yes. I will explain my business, by your leave.” The old burly man proves to be the convict named Magwitch whom Pip helped so long ago, who was sent to Australia where he became a wealthy sheepherder – and remembered Pip’s kindness and set up a trust that would secure Pip for life. Pip was appalled, embarrassed by the nature of his benefactor. But in his efforts to save the old convict from arrest and hanging for returning to England, Pip ceased to be the foppish, condescending dandy he had become. He risked his life, everything – indeed his prior illusions as to the source of his good fortune. He became again the human being he had been as a boy when he relieved the hunger and thirst of a desperate fugitive on the marshes of the River Thames.
Today St. Peter furthers our Advent theme of great expectations, which are likely to surprise us the way Pip was surprised, if they turn out to be genuinely great and life changing, making the heavens we have known vanish and awakening us to new heavens and a new earth. Which makes me wonder whether Charles Dickens had today’s verse in mind when he had Magwitch come up out of that dark stairwell to surprise Pip and alter his life. How does it go? “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.”