A very long wait
Dec. 23rd, 2025 10:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baroque_mongooseI think I've mentioned in a previous post exactly how I read my Bible; basically I read both Testaments in order (more or less - I can decide to read one of the Gospels at any time), but interleaved. And so it happens that tomorrow I shall be finishing Malachi, which is the last book in the Old Testament.
It's remarkably apposite timing; and yet the Old Testament didn't really finish on Christmas Eve, historically speaking. There was a gap. A gap, to be precise, of about 400 years.
It wasn't that nothing happened during that period; if you read the Apocrypha, in particular the books of the Maccabees, you'll find that there was a good deal of quite important history going on during those 400 years. Well, there had to be, really. We finish the Old Testament with the Jews having freshly returned from exile in Babylon under Cyrus and Darius, and by the time we start the New Testament they're very much a nation again, but now they're a Roman colony. But - as far as anyone is aware - there were no prophets in that gap. God wasn't speaking to his people directly for all that time, but only through what had already been written down. And this must have been puzzling and disturbing, because up to that point there had been prophets throughout the history of the Jewish people. Granted, they frequently weren't listened to at the time; but there was always someone who did listen, as evidenced by the very fact that their words were recorded. Even Jeremiah, who got so demoralised about the fact that nobody was listening that it's tempting to diagnose him with clinical depression, didn't just have his faithful scribe Baruch; had it just been those two, his words would not have survived. There must have been other people who saw to it that the words of Jeremiah written down by Baruch were preserved, rather than destroyed, despite the fact that there were clearly those around who'd have been happy to destroy them.
That is one of the reasons why Advent is a season of waiting. It's merely symbolic; the Messiah was awaited for thousands of years before he finally arrived, and the last four hundred of them in apparent silence. Waiting for no more than four weeks doesn't really give any idea of that. Still, we can at least be mindful of those who did wait for all that time; and I think it's good to do that.
I had a good day yesterday and I'm having another one today, so I am going to put up the Christmas decorations today; it is a day early, but I may feel rubbish again tomorrow, and if I do I am not going to want to be mucking around with sticking things to windows. (That's how I normally decorate these days, as it's not safe for me to stand on things in order to fix things into the corners of the ceiling; and I sadly don't have room here for a Christmas tree.) Because the symbolic wait is almost over now.
There is very much a time and a place for reading Revelation, but I think I am not going to start it on Christmas morning. That seems to me the perfect time to start John again instead; for me, there is no passage that conveys the sheer wonder of Christmas like the first chapter of John's Gospel.
God took a deep breath for four hundred years, and then... the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
It's remarkably apposite timing; and yet the Old Testament didn't really finish on Christmas Eve, historically speaking. There was a gap. A gap, to be precise, of about 400 years.
It wasn't that nothing happened during that period; if you read the Apocrypha, in particular the books of the Maccabees, you'll find that there was a good deal of quite important history going on during those 400 years. Well, there had to be, really. We finish the Old Testament with the Jews having freshly returned from exile in Babylon under Cyrus and Darius, and by the time we start the New Testament they're very much a nation again, but now they're a Roman colony. But - as far as anyone is aware - there were no prophets in that gap. God wasn't speaking to his people directly for all that time, but only through what had already been written down. And this must have been puzzling and disturbing, because up to that point there had been prophets throughout the history of the Jewish people. Granted, they frequently weren't listened to at the time; but there was always someone who did listen, as evidenced by the very fact that their words were recorded. Even Jeremiah, who got so demoralised about the fact that nobody was listening that it's tempting to diagnose him with clinical depression, didn't just have his faithful scribe Baruch; had it just been those two, his words would not have survived. There must have been other people who saw to it that the words of Jeremiah written down by Baruch were preserved, rather than destroyed, despite the fact that there were clearly those around who'd have been happy to destroy them.
That is one of the reasons why Advent is a season of waiting. It's merely symbolic; the Messiah was awaited for thousands of years before he finally arrived, and the last four hundred of them in apparent silence. Waiting for no more than four weeks doesn't really give any idea of that. Still, we can at least be mindful of those who did wait for all that time; and I think it's good to do that.
I had a good day yesterday and I'm having another one today, so I am going to put up the Christmas decorations today; it is a day early, but I may feel rubbish again tomorrow, and if I do I am not going to want to be mucking around with sticking things to windows. (That's how I normally decorate these days, as it's not safe for me to stand on things in order to fix things into the corners of the ceiling; and I sadly don't have room here for a Christmas tree.) Because the symbolic wait is almost over now.
There is very much a time and a place for reading Revelation, but I think I am not going to start it on Christmas morning. That seems to me the perfect time to start John again instead; for me, there is no passage that conveys the sheer wonder of Christmas like the first chapter of John's Gospel.
God took a deep breath for four hundred years, and then... the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
