Patience

“Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts.” – James 4:7-8

It is difficult to bear the waiting of this time. There’s so much we don’t know. There’s so much we can’t have. We have to wait longer for smaller things like package deliveries and library books, and bigger things like schooling details and career plans. We are constantly having to defer longings or readjust expectations. And that is hard. The word for “patient” here is literally “to bear suffering long.” Suffering is implied.

French author Simone Weil wrote in her notebooks: “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” James here is talking about the coming of Jesus, but sometimes I think all of life is that waiting. In my waiting for everything else is my waiting for Jesus: for the consummation of the hopes, expectations and desires that I can’t help but have. Learning how to live in the already-but-not-yet.

We’ve passed a lot of farms in our travels lately: unending fields of wheat, onions, potatoes, corn. There is rarely anything happening that we can see. But the promise is there, I suppose. And there are small signs of activity: sprinklers going, tractors driving. Patience is not passive, but active. It means, as Nouwen writes, “to enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us. Patience is the capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as fully as possible the inner and outer events of our lives.”

This is hard. I mostly want to flee or to fight. To escape the wait by distracting myself from my hopes or abandoning them altogether, or to rail against it and batter out my own way. But that is not Jesus’ way. His life, one long wait for the cross, was full of activity. He entered fully into the suffering around him, in such a way that it all became a part of what he eventually did at the cross and in his resurrection. Our waiting too will one day become part of the joy. But until then, we must be patient.

Waiting For The Dawn

“… as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end… God is faithful.” – 1 Corinthians 1:7-9

Many have remarked that living in this pandemic has made lent particularly meaningful as we’ve been forced to give so much up, but I think this year Holy Saturday encapsulates how I feel. There is great mystery in the fact that God did not raise Christ directly from the cross. There was a day in between. The day Jesus stayed dead. As the Westminster Larger Catechism states in its answer to question 50, “Christ’s humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried, and continuing in the state of the dead, and under the power of death till the third day.” As a reading for Holy Saturday inThe Liturgy of the Hours goes, “Something strange is happening on earth today—a great silence, and stillness.”

Holy Saturday was a Sabbath: a day Jesus’ followers grappled with confusion and grief while pinioned into inaction, unable to do anything but sit in inconsolable despair. Holy Saturday is a day of epic disappointment, of the bursting of grand hopes. We are held there in that despair, all our illusions and indulgences emptied. That is how the harder moments of this time have felt: held in place, unable to do anything to retrieve what is lost, unable to speed anything up, contending with monotony and grief and the strange still silence of the world. 

What happens when you are there in that place? We learn to hear words like the ones Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians: God is faithful. And so, we can wait, and even be present to the wait. In a way, Holy Saturday is symbolic of this pandemic which is symbolic of the entirety of my life: living in brokenness while waiting for the resurrection that will surely come. I am waiting for something. God sustains me in the waiting. And I have hope in what I wait for.

This is the first Easter I’ve had since reading N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope, which I highly recommend. “What are we waiting for?” Wright asks in the preface. “And what are we going to do about it in the meantime? Most Christians don’t know what the ultimate Christian hope really is… the classic Christian answer to the question of death and beyond is not so much disbelieved as simply not known.” He describes in chapter 12 how salvation is not about the death of the body and the escape of the soul, not about “going to heaven when we die”—salvation is “being raised to life in God’s new heaven and new earth.” The present bodily life is not valueless because God will raise it to new life. What we do in the present will last into God’s future.

As Simone Weil wrote, “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” Our Holy Saturday is different from that first terrible one, because we know so much more about what we’re waiting for. All the same, part of the work that Jesus did somehow was in staying dead for this day in between, and as his followers there is meaning to us being in that space as well. There is value that will last. May God sustain us to the end.

Chiasms In The Flood

I remember learning in high school Latin class about chiasms, a literary technique using an A-B-C-…-C’-B’-A’ structural pattern. Typically it serves to emphasize whatever is being framed in the center (which I’m told is particularly important in languages like Hebrew where there is no ability to emphasize with bold or italics). It can be used to clarify meaning, by comparing or contrasting B with its B’ counterpart, or for general emphasis given the repetitive nature of its structure.

Reading through Genesis 6-9, I was struck for the first time by the significance of the detailed accounts of time intervals, and then came across this chiastic structuring of the account (from Joe Carter of the Gospel Coalition):

A Noah (6:10a)

B  Shem, Ham, Japheth (10b)

C   Ark to be built (14-16)

D    Flood announced (17)

E     Covenant with Noah (18-20)

F      Food in ark (21)

G       Command to enter ark (7:1-3)

H        7 days waiting for flood (4-5)

I           7 days waiting for flood (7-10)

J            Entry to ark (11-15)

K            God shuts Noah in (16)

L             40 days flood (17a)

M             Waters increase (17b-18)

N               Mountains covered (18-20)

O                150 days water prevail (21-24)

P                  God remembers Noah (8:1)

O’               150 days water abate (3)

N’              Mountain tops visible (4-5)

M’             Waters abate (6)

L’            40 days waiting (6a)

K’           Noah opens window (6b)

J’           Raven and dove leave (7-9)

I’          7 days waiting (10-11)

H’        7 days waiting (12-13)

G’       Command to leave ark (15-17)

F’       Food outside ark (9:1-4)

E’      Covenant with all flesh (8-10)

D’     No flood in future (4-17)

C’    Ark (18a)

B’   Shem, Ham, Japeth (18b)

A’  Noah (19)

This is one person’s interpretation and some may argue with the partitioning, but the general structure brings out a few things. For one, it highlights as the center of the narrative “But God remembered” (Genesis 8:1). I had never really seen the focus of the story that way—we tend to think of ourselves, or maybe the parade of animals, at the center, but when we consider the ark a small speck on the entire watery planet, before a God with the power to undo creation, we see that the entire narrative turns on this point. God is a God who remembers us, and it is a remembrance that results in reversal.

Another takeaway is that Noah did a lot of waiting! For some reason, we tend to think of the flood as forty days long—while there are different interpretations of the exact number of days (not all agreeing with the above), most agree that Noah was in the ark for over a year, with active rain for only a fraction of that year. Can you imagine being inside a boat with the same few people and all the animals, endlessly caregiving and cleaning and stewarding, while waiting for the everlasting waters outside to recede? Sending out a bird, then waiting another seven days before sending out another? Or before that: loading up the ark, then waiting seven days before the first drop of rain falls?

Noah utters not one word of complaint. Interestingly, he utters not one word at all in this entire passage. He listens and does as God commands, nearly always when it made no sense, and waited, nearly always for something he could not see (be it water or land). So much of the spiritual life is in learning to wait well. “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:25). Nouwen notes that the word “patience” is from the Latin “patior,” meaning “to suffer.” “Waiting patiently,” he writes, “is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the fullest in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us,” rather than being anxious about the future and wanting to move on from the present. As Simone Weil wrote, “waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” There’s much of that in this journey, isn’t there? So much of the “already, but not yet,” so much of faith that is being fully present in the now while hoping for what we do not yet see.