Advent: Day 21
“Waiting is an art that our
impatient age has forgotten. It wants to break open the ripe fruit when it has
hardly finished planting the shoot. But all too often the greedy eyes are only
deceived; the fruit that seemed so precious is still green on the inside, and
disrespected hands ungratefully toss aside what has so disappointed them.”
“Not everyone can wait: neither
the sated nor the satisfied nor those without respect can wait. The only ones
who can wait are people who carry restlessness around with them.”
“A prison cell, in which one
waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom
has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent”
“Jesus stands at the door
knocking (Rev. 3:20). In total reality, he comes in the form of the beggar, of
the dissolute human child in ragged clothes, asking for help. He confronts you
in every person that you meet. As long as there are people, Christ will walk
the earth as your neighbor, as the one through whom God calls you, speaks to
you, makes demands on you. That is the great seriousness and great blessedness
of the Advent message. Christ is standing at the door; he lives in the form of
a human being among us.”
“...And then, just when
everything is bearing down on us to such an extent that we can scarcely
withstand it, the Christmas message comes to tell us that all our ideas are
wrong, and that what we take to be evil and dark is really good and light
because it comes from God. Our eyes are at fault, that is all. God is in the
manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil
can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is
secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”
(All quotes from God is in the Manger by Dietrich Bonhoeffer)
