We might spend all year waiting for Christmas. When Jesus was born on the first ever Christmas, Israel had already waited years for the gift of their Messiah.

Read article below or listen to the audio of the talk (delivered on Christmas morning 2022 at St Albans, Fulham):

I spent part of my childhood in Australia – on the other side of the world, and where currently it is summer not winter. Barbie on the beach anyone? When I was there, there was a children’s TV character called Mr Squiggle. In each show he would draw a picture which started out being totally unrecognisable. You’d wait with great anticipation, guessing ‘Is it a this?’ and ‘is it a that?’. If you were lucky you might guess it, but often it just looked like a jumble of lines. That was until, at the very end he would turn it upside down, and you would realise what the picture was that he had been drawing all along.

Israel was waiting for the picture in front of them to make sense. The Messiah they were longing for, the promised deliverer of Israel, wasn’t forthcoming at all. On top of years and years of division and battles, displacement and oppression, their story was continuing to play out in the worst possible way – Israel was now under occupation by a foreign power. And Israel was longing for a Saviour to come and dramatically overthrow the occupying Romans – gloriously emancipating them from the years of oppression, delivering them to live in their own land again, freely and peacefully. This hope was a nation-state scale hope – they wanted a mighty leader to politically and militarily liberate them – for all to see. Hadn’t Isaiah’s prophecy promised this? Didn’t it say that David’s throne would be restored? All those victories, their heroic warrior King – the glory days of Israel restored again.

But, the fulfilment of this promise was nowhere to be found at this Macro level. Instead: down and down, smaller and smaller, focussing finer and finer into the Micro, something was happening at the cellular level of Israel. Because quietly, anonymously, invisibly… in a hidden corner of the nation a young, inconsequential woman discovered she was pregnant with a microscopic foetus, suspended in secret. In her womb was the Son of God, the Saviour of Israel. The gargantuan hopes of a whole nation, a multitude of people with a long complicated history had not only been turned upside down but completely inverted. Their Saviour hadn’t arrived to dramatic fanfare in public glory, but into secret obscurity and vulnerability, and circumstantially, into shame. 

Not that they knew it at the time but their actual Saviour had arrived. Not as Powerful but powerless, not as Visible but invisible, not as Glorious but as shameful, not as Famous but as obscure, not from Without but from within. They couldn’t imagine this, let alone see it, but their hope for a Saviour was being fulfilled… it was nascent, in the form of an utterly dependent baby.

What Israel was imagining its Saviour to be was perhaps a projection on to those ancient prophecies of some very human desires… of greatness and vindication and a grand notion of their identity, of Who they wanted to be, and How they wanted those hopes fulfilled. However, had the promise they were waiting for been fulfilled in the way they were imagining, their saviour would have been born of the same substance as the years of trouble they’d already endured. It’s likely their saviour would have been vainglorious, proud and insufficient to resolve their deepest longings. Disappearing as quickly as he had appeared, failing as quickly as he had succeeded, falling as quickly as he had risen. It’s likely this would have been a fragile, brittle, precarious answer to Israel’s predicament at best.

While the nation of Israel’s hopes for a saviour had grown nebulous and distorted over their years of waiting; their actual Saviour was multiplying and growing with purpose inside that young, pregnant woman. She was being enlarged in quite another way as she waited for Jesus to be born. Not only was her body being physically enlarged by her pregnancy as his life literally multiplied and grew inside her, but her very real sense of expectancy, and joy was increasing every day, along with God’s vision for the life planted within her. Israel’s Saviour would be born of an entirely different substance, of heaven and human humility. 

Because only this could really save Israel… because Israel actually needed saving from themselves. From their pride, rebellion and sinful humanity.  The ultimate answer to Israel’s predicament was the inverse of everything they were imagining. In order to truly deliver them, their Saviour would need to redeem them from the oppression of sin, rescue them from themselves, and transform their lives from within. His kingdom would multiply through surrendered lives, expanding horizons, as light does in the darkness – into all the earth and on into eternity. 

Though unaware, somewhere in Israel, a young woman was patiently waiting, incubating a Saviour, an answer, a solution… for Israel, and for the World. At a time when their own land felt so reduced and shrunken under occupation, and at a time of great distress; in the words of Isaiah, God had in fact, paradoxically ‘enlarged their nation and increased their joy’. He was enlarging Israel, along with Mary, in pregnant expectation. Their joyful expectation increasing while they wait for the time that Jesus is born, to them – when they finally recognise the picture that God has been drawing all along. Waiting for Christmas; the birth of Jesus – the Saviour of the World.

So, what are you waiting for? Waiting is often the incubator for God’s solution to our problems. For our redemption, and for His full answer to our predicament. It’s where our human desires are reckoned with. And it’s where, if we choose to surrender to the process, God refines us and aligns us with his redemptive purpose; enabling us to see what he’s doing. It’s where he enlarges our capacity to hold what he’s giving us and where he maximises the joy we’ll experience when it arrives. So whatever you are waiting for, be encouraged, because as Romans says ‘ …the longer we wait, the larger we become, and the more joyful our expectancy’. 

© Alexandra Noel – All rights reserved. 25th December 2022