A Season of Astonished Waiting: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD

A Season of Astonished Waiting

Advent has always stood as the Church’s quiet insistence that the world is not what it seems. Christian faith begins not with our striving toward God, but with God’s movement toward us. The central message of the Gospel is of God’s intervention to rescue and recreate the self-destructive human race through one person, the person of Christ. That intervention was the greatest miracle, the fusion in one life of the unlimited love and life of God within the boundaries and limitations of a body, and a mind, and a human soul. This is where the Christian imagination finds its beginning. Moreover, this is where Advent places its first marker: it  reminds us of a God who does not merely speak from afar, but actually enters the very conditions that define our fragility.

The early Church understood this with remarkable clarity. Athanasius wrote that the Word took flesh “that we might be made capable of God.” The Incarnation is not an abstract principle; it is the seismic interruption that reorients all human history. All the other miraculous elements in the Gospels, and in the history of the Church, take second place to the Incarnation and, indeed, find their source in it. Advent calls us to linger there, at the source, urging us to gaze upon that miracle before all the others and to recognize in it the depth, and the breadth, of divine compassion.

Augustine reminded his congregation that God came “cloaked in our mortality,” not to overwhelm them but to draw near. Medieval liturgies placed the O Antiphons at the edge of the season as theological signposts pointing to the mystery of a God who bends toward His creation. The Reformers affirmed that the heart of Christian proclamation rests not in a book, or a library, or a system, but in the Word made flesh. The Oxford Movement later returned to the power of the Incarnation as the essential grounding and grammar of Christian worship and Christian life.

Given this, we do not need rationalizations of the rest. If God comes to our world in our flesh and faith says, “Yes, I believe,” there is no pressure to prove or disprove the inerrancy of a text, or to debate the veracity of a miraculous event. Advent calls the Church not to argument but to expectation. It invites us to remember that the Christian story does not require us to tidy up the miraculous, or to justify the plain words of the Gospel . It requires us to attend to the God who enters the world in silence and vulnerability.

The response is not to prove or disprove. The response is wonder and the admission of our own limited understanding, as well as recognizing the inability of any theological system to fully comprehend the nature of that power and that love. Advent teaches us to live within that posture. The season does not demand answers; it summons us to readiness. Rowan Williams observed that we stand in the presence of a God who refuses to be managed or categorized. Advent’s hope rests not in our explanations of what took place, but in the God whose approach we cannot explain or halt.

However, Advent also refuses to let us remain passive. The Incarnation reveals not only who God is, but who we are called to become. A Church that proclaims this mystery yet remains indifferent to suffering has forgotten what it means to wait for Christ. The early Christians understood that their waiting carried ethical weight: their care for the poor, their welcome of the immigrant, and their refusal to abandon the sick, all arose from their conviction that God had crossed the infinite distance to dwell among them.

Advent demands that the Church recover that same moral imagination. The season confronts every form of wounded resignation—political, social, and spiritual—and calls us to a disciplined hope. It summons us to recognize the image of God in the hungry, the unhoused, the isolated, and the forgotten. Advent asks whether our faith communities reflect the shape of Christ’s own self-emptying love. It challenges us to resist systems that diminish human life and to stand with those whom society discards. The Incarnation offers no permission for indifference; indeed, it establishes the pattern of Christian justice. It summons us to discipline our imaginations so that we might perceive the quiet ways in which God moves through ordinary days, conversations, and acts of kindness and courage.

Advent is the season in which the Church renews its commitment to this readiness.

The Incarnation stands at the center of Christian faith and hope. Everything else radiates outward from it. Advent presses us to return to that center, to stand before the mystery without haste, or defensiveness, or fear. It reminds us that the God who came to us in Bethlehem continues to come to His people, continues to renew His world, and continues to call His Church to faithfulness. The season whispers the truth that has animated Christians for centuries: God has entered the story… our story… and nothing will ever be the same.

Advent begins with astonished waiting. It ends with the realization that God is closer than we imagined. The task is not to master this truth, nor to eliminate its mystery. The task is to allow ourselves to be transformed by it.

Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD