Advent Blog

November 23, 2009 by djackson.

(Note: Next Sunday, November 29, marks the beginning of the Advent season.)

But Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart. – Luke 2.19

Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz once returned to campus from summer break and announced to his students that he had spent the vacation traveling . . . and made it halfway across his backyard! Pondering, that’s what the professor was doing – moving slowly, thinking deeply, paying attention to what went on around him.

Mary was a veteran ponderer. When Gabriel busted in on her with an unbelievable status update about a virgin conception and a long-sought savior, she “kept pondering” over it all (Luke 1.29). When, three trimesters down the road, a band of shepherds stomped into the stable with a wild story about heavenly hosts, clamoring for a peak at her baby boy, she said little, instead “pondering” the whole unlikely business.

Those verses use different Greek verbs but they have the same basic meaning – putting seemingly unrelated things together to form new patterns, picking through the data so as not to overlook some detail that holds the whole key. And both times, Luke phrases them in a way that describes ongoing action. You don’t ponder in the single pumping of an elevated pulse, but in the steady heartbeat of the subsequent quiet.

Luke pairs it with the word “treasured,” which has the idea of keeping things in bounds. In some manuscripts of his Gospel Luke has Jesus use it to describe supple containers where amidst the pressure between vintage and leather “both are preserved” (Lk 5.38). Pondering requires flexibility because what you contain can quickly outgrow the one who contains it.

That’s how you ponder. You toss things around until they come together. You feel yourself stretch a little. You take a three-month stroll across your own lawn. You wait, and you watch, and you move very slowly.

Pondering might seem like wasting time but really it’s more like stocking up – piling up and filing away images and ideas, sorting through words until you find the ones that work and learn which ones not to say right now, or ever. The silence of pondering comes in handy when you feel the need to bust a freestyle on the goodness of God; that’s how you compose off the cuff in peasant slang a poem so powerful that people sing it in Latin two millennia later (Luke 1.46-55). It’s how you manage to hold your tongue when the son who showed such early promise seems to have gone off his rocker and refuses to stop preaching long enough to say hello (Luke 8.21).

Ninety days’ perambulation or nine months’ gestation – either example speaks of a carefully cultivated ability to notice what’s there and get ready for what’s coming. That’s what Advent is – four weeks of pondering, of preparing, of feeling the newly-ancient presence of Christ born inside all over again. It bubbles in your soul like fermenting wine; it swells within like a burgeoning fetus. This is not the Christmas rush; this is the Advent ramble, thirty days of knowing that somewhere, down there in the God-shadowed dark, Jesus is about to bust loose all over again.

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