Tag Archives: patience

Be Patient? Third Sunday of Advent, 12/14/2025

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Readings

A child of my age, I resonate with Ambrose Bierce’s definition of patience, “A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.” So, James’ “Be patient” is not what I want to hear.

Actually, James’ “Be patient” and Jesus’ “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me” are acknowledgements of problems, and set the agenda for the sermon.

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” It’s not an unreasonable question, and not simply because John’s been in prison for some time. Recall what we heard last Sunday from John’s description of the coming one: “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing that.

Jesus responds by describing what he has been doing, the description drawing heavily from multiple texts from Isaiah, including our first reading: “the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” The citations from Isaiah aren’t a rhetorical flourish; they’re the argument: Jesus is doing what God promised. Implicit in the response: there is a difference between gathering the wheat and burning the chaff on the one hand and what Jesus has been doing on the other.

Notice that Jesus in his response is doing what he did in the synagogue in Nazareth as recorded by Luke. Reading from Isaiah, he reads up to “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” but omits the following “and the day of vengeance of our God” (Isa 61:1-2; Lk 4:18-19).

Jesus knows that this is both what John does and doesn’t want to hear. Hence “blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” Of course, it’s not a problem only with John. Luke recalls James and John’s response when a Samaritan village refuses to receive them: “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luk 9:54). And it’s been a problem ever since: Jesus and his followers: enacting  God’s vengeance or God’s compassion and mercy (recalling the ending of James’ argument, cut short by the lectionary)?

So that’s one problem, what “the one who is to come” is doing, is commissioning us to do. It affects even our reading of the Magnificat. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, / and has lifted up the lowly./ He has filled the hungry with good things, / and the rich he has sent away empty.” That should give the mighty and rich pause.[1] But following Jesus’ lead we focus our efforts on the lowly and the hungry, a focus that often demands not a little patience.

“Be patient—James writes—until the coming of the Lord.” James is also dealing with a second problem, the delay in that coming. His contribution to our reflection lies in his choice of wording. As Luke Timothy Johnson observes of the verb makrothymein, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament that verb and its corresponding noun are mostly “used of the attitudes of a superiority to an inferior.” “[B]efore the time of judgment, God shows makrothymia; so should the community also share that outlook” (The Letter of James, 313). Contra Ambrose Bierce, we exercise patience from a position of strength, not weakness.

Now, if the delay in Jesus’ coming was a problem for James in the first century, it’s a problem for us in the twenty-first! In the Great Thanksgiving: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” How do I make sense of that delay? Well, in three different ways.

First, were I to push the question, I’d open myself to the same divine response Job got (Job 38-41):

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements– surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7)

And those would be legitimate questions.

The second way is a spin-off from God’s response to Job. We tend to assume that we’re God’s only concern. God spends the last two chapters of the reply to Job celebrating Behemoth (“which I made just as I made you”) and Leviathan (“When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; / at the crashing they are beside themselves.”). We humans are often making a mess of it; the rest of creation, from the hummingbirds to the great whales, are giving exquisite full-throated glory to God.

The third way is more tentative, and takes off from James’ example of the farmer. Some things take time. Crops take months; some things take much longer stretches. Take Yosemite Valley: the time to form those massive blocks of granite, the time for the glaciers to do their thing. So we get the majesty of Half Dome. Or take the Grand Canyon: God introduces what will become the Colorado River: let’s see what that looks like in five or six million years. God is happy to work with long stretches of time.

What if the Creator wishes to explore the potential of this creature made “a little lower than God” (Ps 8:5)? David and his harp: it took time for that technology to develop, and it will take centuries more before a Mozart, a Beethoven, or a Copeland can appear. Or to take a different sort of technology, the centuries to develop the scientific traditions that make possible the achievements displayed in the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Literally breath-taking what we can do together in our best moments.

There is, as Scripture and the daily headlines remind us, more than enough cruelty and suffering to have us crying “Come, Lord Jesus.” Job and these other reflections don’t lessen that impulse, but do make me grateful that I’m not the one making the decision on timing.

To sum up this perhaps strange reflection on our readings, Scripture is clear that the mind is important. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Mat 22:37). And sometimes its importance lies in its capacity to recognize its limits. So I am profoundly grateful that Jesus’ blessing in today’s Gospel is not “Blessed is anyone who understands what I’m doing” but “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

[1] Recall the British ban during their rule in India as well as the more recent bans by dictatorships in Argentina and Guatemala. (Source)

Cristo Rey: ¿Y estamos celebrando qué precisamente? (24 de noviembre, 2024)

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Hoy estamos celebrando la fiesta de Cristo Rey. Pero, ¿qué estamos celebrando exactamente?

Nuestro salmo ofrece una respuesta: poder. “Más potente que la voz de muchas aguas, / más potente que los rompientes del mar, / más potente es el Señor en las alturas.” Y, bueno, la cuestión de poder es bien presente en las otras lecturas.

Recordemos el contexto de la primera lectura. En una visión Daniel veía cuatro bestias saliendo de un mar turbulento, cada bestia más espantosa que las previas, y la última bestia luchando contra y venciendo al pueblo de Dios. Entonces la llegada del Anciano, con “un hijo de hombre” recibiendo “el poder, la gloria, y el reino.”

Escuchamos el mismo tema en la Revelación: “Jesucristo… tiene autoridad sobre los reyes de la tierra.”

Y en el Evangelio, Pilato ostentando su poder sobre el preso. Si hubiéramos leído un versículo más, habríamos escuchado la réplica de Pilato: “¿Y qué es la verdad?” En el mundo de Pilato, con suficiente poder, la verdad no importa. Y este es el mundo que nos aguarda afuera.

Bueno. Con inmensa gratitud celebramos el poder de nuestro Dios. Sin este poder no hay salida. Entonces, aprovechemos las oportunidades de fortalecer nuestro sentido de su poder, o en estas lecturas o en nuestras experiencias con la grandeza de su creación.

Sin embargo, si estamos celebrando solamente este poder, tenemos un problema. ¿Por qué tenemos que vivir en la parte de Daniel 7 donde la bestia lucha contra y vence al pueblo de Dios y no en la parte donde el poder, la gloria, y el reino de este hijo de hombre es obvio? ¿Por qué tenemos que vivir en el mundo de Pilato donde Pilato tiene la última palabra?

No tengo la respuesta. En las palabras de Dios por Isaías: “mis ideas no son como las de ustedes” (55:8). Pero en nuestros textos sí hay un indicio. La bestia lucha contra el pueblo de Dios. Y ¿qué sabemos de este pueblo de Dios? En la Revelación: “Cristo nos ama, y nos ha librado de nuestros pecados.” ¿Quiénes somos? Amados, pecadores librados. Entonces, aunque podemos hablar—como hablan muchos de los salmos—de los justos y los malos, debemos hablar también de pecadores recibiendo la libertad que Dios ofrece y de pecadores rechazándola. Jesucristo ama a Pedro…y a Pilato. En la primera carta de Pablo a Timoteo: Dios “quiere que todos se salven y lleguen a conocer la verdad” (2:4). O, como Jesús ben Sirac lo expresa en Eclesiástico, “El hombre se compadece solo de su prójimo, pero el Señor se compadece de todo ser viviente; él reprende, corrige, enseña, y guía como un pastor a su rebaño” (18:13).

Por eso, el poder de Dios es buenas noticias para nosotros los pecadores porque Dios es—primero—Amor, y emplea su poder con paciencia. Paciencia con nosotros, paciencia con nuestros enemigos. Y quizá—quizá—esta es una parte de la respuesta a nuestra pregunta. ¿Por qué seguimos diciendo “Cristo volverá”? También porque Dios es paciente.

Y si Dios es paciente, que nosotros—pecadores recibiendo la libertad que Dios ofrece—seamos pacientes, compasivos, con nuestros prójimos, también con nuestros enemigos. No como una expresión de resignación o de impotencia, sino porque así se comparta nuestro Dios. ¡Viva Cristo Rey!