I was working with a group of Theopolis Fellows last week studying the parable of the prodigal son from Luke 15. In this study something caught my attention in a new way: the diligence of the father. Specifically I was struck by the way he waits in hope for the return of the prodigal. That consistent faithful waiting, the kind that would allow him to run to gather his son when he sees him instead of standing defensively while the son approaches, is one that is full of suffering.
For to hope is to suffer. Hoping means waiting. And for mortals waiting is a source of intense suffering. Jean Amery suggested that “space” and “time” were two key features of our passage through life. Waiting, hoping, is to forfeit both space and time. We don’t “move-on”. Rather we keep the vigil at the bedside of our longings. Standing still, remaining hopeful, is in some sense to suffer the loss of the opportunities and potentialities we could experience if we just gave up. It is to foreclose on some of the options that would have been available if we gave up hoping. “Curse God and die” is the suggestion of Job’s wife, which is to say “stop all this waiting —all this hoping— just end the story already, for I no longer have the stomach to watch it play-out any longer.” The pain of hope is embodied in the shards of pottery that Job uses to lance the boils that benight him as he sits in burlap and ashes.
And so in the parable of the prodigal son, the father suffers the pain of waiting, of hoping for his son to return. One might reasonably wonder if the father of the parable did not spend his days and nights in burlap too. It would follow a biblical logic that he fasted and mourned for his son, albeit “not as those who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4.13), but in the hopes of receiving his son back from the dead, like Job received children from the Lord in very places of death (like Abraham before him).
Often it is easier to stop hoping. Being hopeless is safe. It protects us from the precarity and hazards of having our hopes disappointed. Being hopeless protests against the story going-on anymore.
It’s like that scene from Monty' Python and the Holy Grail (please do not mistake a reference for a recommendation): The gatherer of the dead clangs his iron-triangle and cries “bring-out your dead!” And a man comes-out carrying a still living person on his shoulders. The gatherer stops the man and says, “Eh, he’s not dead.” But the man protests, saying that he’s sick, he’s not well, and that he will be dead very soon. All the while the “dead man” is crying aloud “I’m not dead” and offering proofs of his vitality.
But “not being dead yet” is not good enough for the hopeless. In hopelessness we want to “get it over with” like Job’s wife, we want to “finish it already”, we want to “be done with it.” And so the hopeless man asks the corpse-gatherer “Look, isn’t there something you can do?” And so the corpse-gatherer turns and kills the dying man. Rather than suffering the waiting-for-him-to-die or suffering the hoping-that-he-turns-a-corner his guardian asks the dead-gatherer to go ahead and kill him, to end him, to finish him early so that he no longer has to endure the pain of hoping. Hopelessness is the analgesic to numb the pain of waiting.
The scene from Monty Python (again, reference not recommendation) highlights the way in which hopelessness, in order to protect us from the pain of hoping, often “deadens our pain” precisely by making us dead. This is what was promised to Odysseus and his men on the isle of the lotus eaters: eat the flower and be freed from nostalgia (“nostos” = homecoming; “algos” = pain) —from the pain of longing to return home. What is nostalgia but the pain of hoping and remembering? The Lotus-eaters offer the anesthetization that comes from neither remembering nor hoping. As Tennyson phrases their promises that “Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil” he underscores the fact that the slumber that they offer is in fact the sleep of death —the perpetual numbness of the living dead.
Both Homer’s Lotus-eaters and Monty Python’s dead-gather offer the freedom from the riskiness of hope; they offer a preemptive end to the pain that comes from the expectancy that is the posture of waiting.
The season of Advent arrives this Sunday. Advent is a season of hope. Advent is therefore a season of waiting and pain. That is why we drape the church in Lenten purple. Advent hurts. For Advent reminds us that we are called to be a people of Hope. A people suffering the pain of living between the satisfaction of his first appearing and the waited-on promise of his second. And we cannot finish the story early. God’s story is not one that we can “speed-read” or “fast-forward-to-the-end-of”. We must wait for the ripening, for the maturing, of his kingdom.
But that doesn’t mean in our painful waiting we do nothing. No, like Job and the father of the parable, our waiting is not merely passive. In our waiting, in our hurting, we speak. As I wrote a few weeks ago, drawing on the insights of Byung-Chul Han, when we lift up the voice of our hope, with all of its suffering, our pain becomes eloquent. It is given a voice before the throne of God: “Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus.”