Wednesday in Holy Week – Patience

“Good things may come to those who wait, but only what’s left by those who hustle.” That’s a remark attributed to Abraham Lincoln, and it articulates a commonplace scepticism about the value of the fourth fruit of the Spirit, patience. Patience is something we tell children to have when they’re badgering us for their dinner or asking if the car journey is nearly over. But in the adult world, it’s not highly prized. We are more likely to respect people who don’t hang about, people who deliver results fast and get what they want quickly.

In former times, patience was given a central importance. Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century held that “patience is the root and guardian of all virtues”. The absence of patience is not, therefore, one aspect of what’s wrong with the world. It’s at the heart of that wrongness. The Czech novelist Franz Kafka wrote that Adam and Eve’s fall from the Garden of Eden arose principally from a lack of patience: “Impatience got them expelled; impatience keeps them from returning.”

So what might it mean to see patience as something much more foundational to human flourishing and the common good? Fundamentally, what we’re talking about is living well in time. Humans are temporal creatures. We grow over time, physically, emotionally, intellectually, psychologically. We are affected by the rhythm of the seasons. We have to pace ourselves and plan. We have to remember that Rome was not built in a day. Modernity has increasingly played this down, making us believe that we are more like the machines we have created, able to process data faster and faster, immune to the temporal rhythms of nature.

Losing the ability to live well in time makes us frustrated. We become frustrated by the limitations of our bodies, frustrated by our inability to accomplish the goals we have set ourselves, frustrated that the change we want to see continues to evade us. And this frustration is impatience.

Judas wanted the world to change. We don’t know exactly the change he wanted but it seems likely that he longed for the messiah to return to lead the Jewish people in revolt against the occupying Roman Empire. Judas wanted a revolution. Jesus had never said that he would fulfil that role, but the crowds of Palm Sunday suggest that Judas wasn’t alone in thinking that Jesus might be one God had sent to bring about this dramatic change.

So Judas committed to Jesus, followed him, and stuck with him. But now his patience has run out, because Jesus is not doing what he wants. Jesus does not understand his vocation in that way. And Judas can no longer live well in time.

Back at the start of Lent we recalled the temptations which the devil put to Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, and these were temptations to do exactly what Judas now wants. They were temptations to impatience.

The first was to turn stones into bread. But God willed that Jesus give his own body as bread for the life of the world at Calvary. All in good time.

The second temptation was to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple to force God’s hand and save his life. God will resurrect the life of Jesus, but not before his work is done. All in good time.

The third temptation was to claim the kingdoms of the earth by bowing down to Satan. Jesus will establish his kingdom on earth, but only through his ministry of teaching, healing and self-giving on the cross. All in good time.

So the temptations in the wilderness all express the desire to fast forward, to imagine there is a quick, easy route, rather than living well in time. They are temptations to impatience. Jesus resisted them. Judas cannot.

It is possible that Judas thought that his betrayal would force Jesus’s hand, or perhaps force God’s hand, by precipitating some cosmic crisis. This is a pervasive religious temptation. God has created us to live in time and to work for his purposes within time. But religious fanatics get impatient and want to hasten the End Times. Much of the Christian Zionism that has influenced American foreign policy in the Middle East over the last few years is rooted in a belief that we are in fact living at the end of the world. It holds that there is no point working patiently in time to build peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians because the violence and chaos engulfing them are signs of Jesus’s imminent return. Islamist terrorists are not dissimilar in their impatience with living in the temporal world God has created.

And, of course, there are secular forms of this temporal impatience everywhere. It is increasingly present in our conception of what it means to be an activist. There are times when righteousness compels us to protest and speak up for the changes we believe the world needs to see. But increasingly in our society that protest is done on social media accounts by frustrated keyboard warriors. Even in the real world, protest has become decoupled from realism. And so often the protest is a sign that we have just gotten frustrated with the hard work of bringing these changes about.

I am not unsympathetic to the impatience. It is indeed hard to be patient in times when the crises we face are so urgent. I too feel the anxiety that we don’t have time to waste in addressing climate change, in demanding an end to war, in addressing the outrageous inequalities that persist in our world. But there are no magic wands, and the revolutions we’ve seen (at least in my lifetime) have brought as many new problems as they have solved.

Effective social change – building a peaceful, just and sustainable world – is a collective project of living well in time. And if we’re going to contribute to that project meaningfully, we will need the fruit of patience.

You may have heard of Jadav Payeng. He is better known as the Forest Man of India. Since 1979 he has been planting trees on Majuli Island in North India. Over nearly four decades he has planted an entire forest in an area at high environmental risk. The forest is now home to tigers, rhinos, elephants, deer and rabbits. He has single handedly renewed a significant part of the global ecosystem by the simple act of planting trees.

I can’t think of anything that better illustrates the art of living well in time. He has accomplished more than thousands of other environmental activists. He has borne the fruit of patience, and that patience has borne the fruit of meaningful change.

And that’s a reminder that growing in the fruits of the Spirit is also a temporal process. The rhythms of our worship and our prayers cultivate in us the capacities to live well in time. Just as Jesus resisted the devil and waited and worked patiently for the moment when he would be glorified, so good things do indeed come to us who wait on God.