WE SPEND a good deal of our lives waiting: for every­thing from buses (which tend, of course, to come all at once) to news of loved ones, test results, or the outcome of job applications. In W. H. Auden’s “Christmas oratorio”, For the Time Being, the Third Shepherd com­ments: “What is real About us all is that each of us is waiting.”

Advent provides a holding space for the period of waiting which has its end on Christmas Day. It embraces the possibility that the coming presence of God is an answer to an absence. In its context, of course, the absence was un­known, but was filled with imagin­ative and visionary wonderings about who the Messiah might be, and when he would arrive.

For us, the question “Who are we waiting for?” seems to lead to an obvious answer: Christ. So why begin with what we already know? The answer lies deep within the ques­tion; we do indeed wait for Christ, but the certainty is balanced by an uncertainty about what lies ahead. The incarnation invites us to delve deeper into the mystery of God’s love, about which we cannot know everything — not yet, anyway.

Our Gospel authors crafted their narratives in order to tell a story and to proclaim its good news. If we follow the suggestion of the New Testa­ment scholar Richard Bauck­ham that the Evangelists are working from eyewitness testimony (which, in Bauckham’s definition, is both the narrating of events and the inter­pretation of their meaning), there is an immediacy to the words of those Gospel texts, a closeness to the abid­ing presence of the one they write about.

But Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write into a vacuum. They wrote because they needed to make sense of what seemed like an impossibility to their communities. Their writing is rooted in the life of people whose identity was being crafted into that of Christ, and who wanted to make sense of impossibil­ities at both ends of the story: birth, and death and resurrection.

As a friend of mine once said to me (paraphrasing an idea from C. S. Lewis): “Sometimes important things become real only when they seem impossible.” At the heart of both the incarnation and the resur­rection lie events that could have appeared to be impossible. Yet, as it turned out, they were not im­possible, and our Gospel-writers tell us that.

In Luke 1.34, Mary asks the angel: “How can this be?”, and the angel responds in the next verse with the certainty that what might have seemed impossible will be made possible. The sense of mystery remains, however. In order to gain a sense of what these events of birth, death, and resurrection meant, and still mean today, we need to put ourselves in a place of unknowing; facing anew the full impact of the knowledge that, in Christ, God was doing something utterly new and profoundly transformative.

The unknowing persists: it does not end with Christmas Day; for mystery is part and parcel of the pilgrimage. “Who are we waiting for?” Let me tell you; come and see; share in the amazement that unfurls before our eyes. Let us wonder together; for, if we do, we shall surely realise that the wonder and awe at the manger make the apparent impossibility of the incarnation suddenly real in our lives.

One Advent, an encounter with the startling life-size nativity scene out­side Canterbury Cathedral startled me out of my usual relation­ship to crib scenes, as I imaginatively entered the story and played my part alongside the crowds of visitors who were likewise mesmerised by its vividness.

Some years ago, when I was an undergraduate in Scotland studying theology, I was oc­casion­ally asked (somewhat tongue in cheek): “Are you a Christmas Christian, or an Easter Christian?” This reached dizzy heights one year when Holy Week fell during term, and the events of Christ’s Passion, death, and resur­rection were played out in between lectures, seminars, and everything else that makes up an under­gradu­ate’s week.

Easter Day was a typically blustery day on the Fife coast. I was given the task of leading a group standing “con­fused” (and certainly shivering) by the “unexpectedly empty tomb”, situated in the ruins of the cathedral, as another group headed towards us carrying lit torches of fire (their walk more of an urgent and determined push into the wild winds).

I was aware that I had to respond to words that were being shouted at me, but were disappearing out to­wards the sea. The dialogue went something like this.

“Hello.”

“Pardon?”

“Who are you waiting for?”

“What?”

“WHO ARE YOU WAITING FOR?”

(“What are they saying?”)

“Sorry!”

At which point, my script, which in any case was folded in two by the gales, was blown out of my hands; a flimsy bit of paper carried away by the forces of nature that were gaining in strength.

When I reflect on those events now, they present a refreshing frame­work through which to view not just Easter, but the Nativity. Often, we need a new lens through which to view familiar stories. Looking back at that blowy Easter morning, there we were, imagining ourselves at the tomb, trying to make sense of an absence, not realising that the presence of the one who had been laid there dead now walked in the light of the resurrection.

Back at the very start of the story, the presence in the manger is part of the journey towards the absence in the tomb, which itself creates the eternal pres­ence of Christ in the resurrection. Both parts of the story matter: the manger and the tomb tell of the dynamic forces at work. Both stories contain the fear of unknow­ing, and the awe-filled response to the divine presence at work.

Many artists have, of course, captured the annunciation in vary­ing ways. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini!, first exhibited in 1850, in particular captures more of a sense of fear in Mary than joy, something that has always chal­lenged my thinking about this important episode.

The Lukan account presents Mary “pondering” what she has been told by the angel, and responding with words of praise. The women at the tomb in Mark’s account apparently say nothing to anyone, yet are in awe at what they have encountered (not quite “shivering in their sandals” as some would have it, although they perhaps do model fear in a positive way).

All of this should be an encour­age­ment to us that we have a part to play in the story if we only allow ourselves to be swept along with the drama, and think ourselves into the places of the characters. How would you respond?

Mark’s Gospel (our lection­ary Gospel for this church year) is often cast aside at Christmas. This is perhaps under­stand­able, given the lack of stable-and-manger action. Mark also leaves us unsatisfied with the ending of the story, concluding with a “for” (the literal final word in Greek, if we favour the ending at Mark 16.8).

Likewise, John is distinctly lacking in Wise Men, angels, and shepherds, although of course the prologue is usually offered as part of the Christmas morning readings.

Both Mark and John, however, provide strong clues about “Who are we waiting for?” through the cross. It is on the cross, and in the events that follow, that the true depths of Jesus’s identity are revealed, but it becomes real only if, when we reach the end of the story, we reconnect with the be­ginning: seeing beyond the incarnate God lying in the manger, reading and listening to the events of that child’s life as his public ministry ushered forth the Kingdom that turned everything upside down.

In that sense, Christmas Day is not just about a birth, it is also about a life lived, experienced, betrayed, de­stroyed, and lived again, for all time, through the power of the resur­rection.

But still, the question that we began with — “Who are we waiting for?” — needs constantly to be asked. For all our certainty, our knowing that we wake on Christ-mas morning to the dawning of a new reality, we cannot and should not be lulled into a complacency about the one for whom we wait. Mystery, wondering, and pondering are essential elements of our faith.

Advent has been filled with vision­ary readings that prepare us for Christmas Day. Visions in the Bible tend to take the form of divine messages communicated to human beings by direct voice — by angelic presence or by the exercising of the imagina­tion in tune with God’s direction. The result is often a pro­cess of wondering and pondering. Visions are held by the relationship of trust that must be in place; the possibility that God can give us difficult tasks to do because God believes that we can manage.

Part of the challenge of any visionary encounter is the creating of space within which object and mys­tery might come together to experi­ence God’s eternity: the point of encounter creates the oppor­tunity for change. Having a vision allows us to dare to hope with courage. The incarnation offers that hope, because it encourages us to be part of the sharing of that won­drous event with others. As recounted in the biblical narrative, it is not a flat, distant story; it is rooted, yet timeless. The gospel is meant to be shared, and the difference that the incarnation makes to our world is something that ought to be celebrated.

In many homes, the Holy Family begins, on Advent Sunday, its journey from room to room to­wards the crib scene. It is significant, how­ever, that we do not spend the whole of Advent slowly reading our way through the birth narratives. Rather, Sunday by Sunday, and day by day, we approach Christmas Day from the perspective of other biblical passages.

As we have listened to these texts, our reflections on their meaning have given them new colour and texture in our here and now. The question “Who are we waiting for?” has been enriched with a pondering at the very heart of the big-picture narrative of scripture itself. Story, context, and conversation have be­come part of our experience of this season.

We tell about what happened; we watch it unfold in nativity plays that can take place in many different contexts; we talk about what we have seen and what Christmas means for us (for some, negatives as well as positives). Yet this is not without its challenges.

One year, my local city council decided to hold a “Winter Light Festival” rather than celebrate Christ­mas. The result was a blend of traditional carols, accompanied by a brass band; illuminated symbols of the sun, moon, and stars; and in­flatable Santa Claus balloons.

The meaning of the narrative be­came interrupted, and I suspect that that is part of the challenge of proclaiming the mystery of the incarnation. Stories are not isolated from the context in which they are told, and this is where interpretation can help us to appreciate the time and distance between us and the story that we are encountering. Stories mark time — both the time in which they were told and eventu­ally written down, and our own time.

But, if the sense of the story gets lost in the midst of commercialism and other so-called secularising agendas, how can we hope that the vision of God’s love that lies rooted in that story may find the light of day? It is as if the Holy Family en route to the crib scene has been held back from making progress, waiting for an opportunity to continue on its journey.

One of the consequences of recognising a relationship between deeper meanings that may reside within the texts, and the ways in which we may be able to tell our stories as part of the larger story of God’s dealings with our world, may be most helpfully de­scribed as a theology of reading. The stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell each other can (if we allow them to) constitute a redemptive endeavour.

In his work on narrative theo­logy, the English Literature scholar Alan Jacobs reflects on us becoming consciously aware of telling our own stories and of thinking about our lives narratively so as to impart wisdom. In his book Looking

Before and After: Testimony and the Chris­tian life (Eerdmans, 2008), Jacobs reflects that telling a story well without simply veering into sen­timent­ality or forcing a happy ending is key in Christian witness.

Our task — mandated, one might say, in the Gospels — is to bear witness to the truth, including the difficult parts, and the details that do not seem to make sense, at least at the outset. I wonder whether this is what John is doing in his prologue, which interprets the wonder of the incarnation in a way that allows us to be bathed by the light of its wisdom. The incarnation is a story full of the unexpected delights, fears, and hopes of a new life. John, and for that matter Mark, too, hint that there is yet more for God to do.

Both these Gospels end with events “off the page”, as if to open the door ever wider to a sense of “what happens next?” They artfully craft their narratives in a way that is echoed by the words of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, who muses that “things are more than they are”, and “give more than they have”.

As we approach the dazzling light of Christmas Day, we know that it is only the beginning of the story.

“Who are we waiting for?”

Emmanuel, God with us!

If God is indeed with us, then that relationship of encounter invites us to respond in word and action. The incarnation creates discipleship, an opportunity to participate in the story.

“Who are we waiting for?”

Christ.

“Who is that?” the next question might be. Our response: “Let me tell you; come and see.”

The Revd Dr Helen-Ann Hartley is a lecturer in New Testament at Ripon College, Cuddesdon, and Dean-elect of the College of St John the Evangelist, Auckland, New Zealand.