Reimagining Christmas: Encountering A New Way of Seeing the Advent Season

The other week I mentioned to my pastor that my entire conception of Christmas was being overturned in one fell swoop this year. I consider myself to be fairly well read, and I have experience in and with a variety of denominations over my many years as a Christian. I’ve been through undergrad and seminary, and I’ve served in a professional capacity in liturgical and non-liturgical settings.

And yet, up until this year I had never really noticed Advents focus on the second coming of Jesus. Growing up, my Church environment, not to mention my social and family context, always emphasized Advent as a celebration of the arrival of the Christ child, not His second coming. Perhaps it is because this viewpoint was so ingrained in me that I simply heard the language of the second coming through the lens of the first during my time serving in the Lutheran Church where it likely would have been more prominent. Truth be told, after digging into it a little bit, I’ve discovered I am not alone. In fact, its even kind of a thing in liturgical histories, where the Christmas focus has seen a bit of an ebb and flow concerning its emphasis on the first and/or second coming over different times and cultures.

In any case, and for whatever reason, I found myself this year in the Advent portion of N.T. Wright’s devotional book On Earth As It is In Heaven, being slightly confused by the fact that day after day seemed to be all about the eschaton. Then I went to celebrate the first Sunday of advent at our Church (part of the Evangelical Covenant Church), and it was all about the second coming. And then I dove into the book, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ by Fleming Rutledge, and it was more of the same.

That’s when I wondered what was going on and how I had managed to miss this emphasis after all these years. That’s when I set out to try and make new sense of precisely what Advent means.

Which of course brought me to that key and central word- waiting. Advent is, above all, a time of waiting. For me, this waiting was always attached to the slow progression leading towards the arrival of the Christ child. In a sense this is, of course, a part of the picture. But historically speaking, as some fellow readers of Wright pointed out, Advent is about the first advent being a signpost for the second. Which is to say, we wait in the light of the first arrival in expectation of its culmination. Equally in historical terms, there has been some resistance, be it in language or practice, towards emphasizing the second coming in the Advent season, perhaps because it tends to be attached to such strong language of judgment. And yet, in its purest form, the Christmas songs and celebration are withheld in the liturgy until Christmas Day (or Eve) precisely because the time of waiting is treated as a time to prepare for Jesus’ return. Thus, in some way, form and fashion, the time between the final day of the Church calendar (the feast of Christ the King Sunday) and its beginning (the first arrival of the Christ child on Christmas Day, or the last Sunday of Advent) is an invitation into the storied cycle of this waiting and anticipation. It is about learning how to live differently in light of Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love, all marks of what the Gospel teaches to be the new Kingdom breaking in through the person and work of Jesus. The lead up to Christmas day is anchored in the conviction that something new happened and that this newness is marked by the arrival of the promised kingdom and the King who is, even now, on the throne.

As Wright so poignantly expresses,

“For Paul something had happened. The living God had acted in person, in the person of Jesus, to rescue people from that “present age”(of sorrow, shame, exile and death), and to launch “the age to come” (when all things will be put right).” The two ages were not, as it were, back to back, the first stopping when the second began. The new age had burst upon the scene while the “present age” was still rumbling on. This was the direct effect of the divine plan by which Jesus “gave himself for our sins”; the power of the “present age” was thereby broken, and the new world could begin.”

If the ancient Jewish peoples only ever expected the Messiah to come once at the fullness of time when all would be resurrected, the scandal of Jesus’ birth is tied to “a single resurrection in the middle of history”. Thus Jesus is, as Wright puts it, both the starting point of the new creation and the goal or fulfillment of Israel’s hopes.

One of the great things I have discovered about reorienting my focus this Advent season is how it has been recontextualizing that story. Often Jesus is treated as the starting point of MY salvation, with Israel’s story being relegated to a scapegoat, a people destined to fail so that Jesus might succeed on my behalf. Their story is treated, commonly within Protestantism, as a people who thought they could earn their way to heaven, while we have thus learned that it is only “by grace through faith”. All of this misses the true power of the story, or the Law (understood as the story of Israel’s own expectation), that Jesus is in fact fulfilling. If Jesus is the fulfillment, then we do not wait as one under the Law, meaning as one in a world where Jesus did not come, we wait as one in Christ, meaning as one in a world where Jesus did in fact come. This is the proclamation of the Gospel, and it speaks not at the expense of the story, but rather to its relevance. A people raised up for the sake of creations redemption have found this promise realized in Jesus. Christ has come. And it is because of this story that we can say now with confidence, Christ will come again.

And so we wait, but not as those without hope, peace, joy and love, the mark of heaven invading earth. This is, as the second coming so clearly calls us towards, the necessary time of preparation, the work of living in the way of a kingdom that is, in fact, already here.

As Wright puts it,
“The whole point of Jesus’ work was to bring heaven to earth and join them together forever, to bring God’s future into the present and make it stick there. But when heaven comes to earth and finds earth unready, when God’s future arrives in the present while people are still asleep, there will be explosions. And there were.”