Advent is the time of both “waiting and hastening”; Barth loved to quote a verse from the second letter of Peter: “waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God” (II Pet. 3:12). Advent is the dialectic between the waiting and the hastening, the faithful confidence that strains forward toward the day and the long endurance that’s required to wait for it. There is no time given us in this life other than this time, the time between the first coming of our Lord in humility and his second coming in glory. This is a strong theme in the Gospel of Matthew.
