Isaiah’s First Theology of Waiting
“Lo! He comes with clouds descending” is one of the great hymns we associate with Advent, and it invites wider contemplation than it is perhaps always given.
For all that language of clouds descending, our faith at heart is very much an act of waiting with anticipation. Indeed, salvation history is the story of man waiting upon God. The religion of the Old Testament is quite essentially a religion of promise, and therefore a religion of hope, as it presents one long vigil for the Messiah. The New Testament turns upon the coming of that Messiah which, upon his ascension, opened for his Christian followers our vigil for His triumphant return in the Parousia.
To the Christian, all history is thus a journey of desire towards a meeting with the divine. In its purest form, this waiting for God has always been a practical expression of human hope, and this hope has always been based on a divine promise. Thus, every Christian life is but a short span of time in waiting for the full and final union with God.
Of all the Old Testament prophets, the one who stands out as the prophet of Hope, and thus the one setting out the first theology of waiting, is Isaiah — whom we read a great deal in Advent.
Isaiah is the great announcer of the coming of the Lord. Using many different images, he foretells the approaching messenger of hope and healing incarnate, who will make Israel worthy of being called God’s Chosen People. He calls him Emmanuel: God with us, a child who will be both Prince and Prophet, the perfect Ruler, who will govern in justice and peace, because “the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him.” Yet he also speaks of him as a terrifying Judge before whom all sinners will pale.
Yet for all the power of this hope and vision, the Israelites had an overall amorphous concept of the Messiah. The Christian perspective emerged from the actual coming of the Messiah as related in the New Testament. This is the encounter to which the church has been subsequent witness through time, and it is one which surpasses that of the Old Testament; for we wait now, not alone for Christ but with Christ, united to Him as we pray in His prayer and in his hope that all mankind “may be one” at the day of His return. Thus, for all that each individual Christian may still see only in “a glass in a darkly,” we wait for the glorious vision to come when we shall see God face to face.
Salvation history is thus a continuous and progressive movement of all creation towards the final union with its Creator. It is this continuity of God’s plan that underlines and makes possible our use of the Old Testament and the hopes and prayers of Isaiah to voice our Christian hope so powerfully.
All this means that the Incarnation did not freeze the hopes of mankind, rather it has given us greater, clearer understanding of the object of our hope. In one very deep sense, the Incarnation was really the end of Israel’s long vigil: Christ came, the prophecies were fulfilled, atonement was accomplished, and mankind was redeemed. But the faith that Christ left to His Church was a religion of promise – and the religious attitude that He gave to His followers was an attitude of hope eternal.
The apostles, enlightened by Christ’s teaching and the coming of the Spirit, lived lives utterly centered on Christ himself as the terminus of their faith, their hope, and their love. This left a profound latent question for the early church, which was how to relate Christ’s first coming to the future. But it was Christ Himself who was discerned to have provided the answer, through His teaching on the Parousia: the time of Christ’s second coming, when in the words related in Luke 21 “they will see the Son of man coming in a cloud and great glory” (v. 27).
Advent is thus far more than merely a time of immediate preparation for the feast of Christmas. Rather it is an annual invitation to renew and deepen our Christian waiting for the full and final coming of Christ’s Kingdom, remembering that “…our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20-21).
The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector