Hoping with Expectancy

It's Christmas morning: Bach's Christmas Oratorio is playing in the living room, a coffee cake is in the oven and the family is scattered around the house quietly for bible study before the day begins. But there is such a different feeling in the house than any other quiet family day. There is an expectancy in the air. The treasured traditional meal. The post-meal time of fellowship around the table in which we feast again, this time in worship. Then of course there is the tremored excitement of giving gifts (especially for those of us who are keen on surprises) a bit later in the day.

All these traditions are yet to come. But the most monumental moments of Christmas have already occurred. Last night, my family and I attended a midnight service at which I was playing, and at the stroke of 12, the bells pealed out into a silence which, despite fatigue, held the weight of hope. Immediately following, we feasted eagerly on "the gifts of God for the people of God" and then, with our own small candles lit from the Christ Candle, we sang out into the darkness of our hope. It is a hope too full for words: a hope that rests and exults in fulfillment while setting its face towards a day yet to come. It weeps for joy and it yearns for "the Fullness of Time" to come, once and for all. It celebrates the advent of the One who would inaugurate a new covenant in his own flesh, and cries out with an inexpressible ache for that One to come again in power and glory to make all things new. 

The pang of this kind of hope is everywhere. It is present when we find solace and peace and elation in the aspect of a glorious sunset and yet find the giddy inexplicable impulse (as my pastor said yesterday) "to climb inside it," to bathe in it, to become one with it rather than just stand on the outside and observe it. There will be a day!

It is there between lovers who find that as their souls are knit together, there doesn't seem to be a hug long enough or snug enough to express the joy and peace and safety they find in one another. It is almost as if the presence of two bodies rather than one becomes a nuisance: a barrier for the oneness which the soul longs towards. 

There are a thousand examples of this sort of solid hope which rests but also strains forward. The coffee cake is nearly ready, however, and Bach's cantata just finished so I'll stop here for now. May we rejoice today because our redemption has come! Hallelujah! But may we also hope with unshakable expectancy towards a day when Christ will return to marry His Bride, when the taste of what it means to be "in" Christ will become a full oneness with him, and when we will see his face (oh what a thought!) in new bodies able to climb into His glory.