Waiting, in theological terms, represents a liminal space between promise and fulfilment—a space charged with both pain and potential.
The 400 inter-testamental years, often described as “silent,” reveal that divine silence is not divine absence.
Within this apparent void, God was at work, preparing the world for the incarnation of Christ, whose ministry inaugurated redemption and the restoration of broken humanity.
As liberation theologian James Cone (1975) argues, divine revelation is inseparable from God’s commitment to the oppressed; salvation history unfolds not in comfort but in conflict, struggle, and the assertion of human dignity.
A similar theological rhythm can be discerned in the 400 years following the height of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.
While legal abolition ended formal enslavement, its psychic, social, and theological residues persist in systemic racism and the collective trauma of the African diaspora.
Postcolonial theologians such as Anthony Reddie (2012) interpret this ongoing waiting not as passive endurance but as creative participation in God’s redemptive movement toward justice.
Waiting becomes a dynamic theological act—an embodied protest that holds space for both lament and hope.
The descendants of the enslaved thus remain engaged in a sacred struggle for recognition, restoration, and reparation—a continuation of the Exodus motif where liberation is both divine promise and communal pursuit.
Waiting becomes not weakness but agency: a site of theological imagination where memory is preserved, dignity reaffirmed, and futures re-envisioned.
Just as the inter-testamental silence gestated the coming of the Messiah, so too might this prolonged post-slavery waiting give birth to a renewed vision of justice—a movement from redemption to restoration and, ultimately, to reparation. upon all those you love.
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‘Waiting becomes not weakness but agency’. Have you an experience of the embodied agency of waiting?