Advent & Christmas Miscellany, 12/22/25

I With You Am

Reformed theologian Peter Leithart offers a fascinating meditation on Advent and its fulfillment at Christmas based on Hebrew word order.

His article published in First Things is entitled I With You Am.  It’s behind a paywall, but here is a description from the First Things newsletter:

The last thing Jesus tells his disciples before his Ascension is “Behold, I am with you all the days, until the end of the age” [Matthew 28:20; Lexham English Bible].  Except our English translation isn’t quite accurate—he actually says “I with you am.” This slight rearrangement is the fulfillment of all God’s “I am” statements throughout all of Scripture, Peter Leithart explains. God places his people (“you”) within himself (“I am”)—a fitting reflection in Advent as we await Immanuel, “God with us.”

Now I’m not sure that in a highly inflected language like Hebrew the word order carries this much meaning, but maybe it does.  At any rate, Leithart’s point remains.  Christ really does place His people within Himself.  Those who have been baptized are “in Christ”  (Romans 6:1-11).

And this does indeed speak to us of Advent and brings up an aspect that we often overlook.  Advent is about Christ’s “coming to” us.  He came to us in the past, in His birth in Bethlehem.  He will come to us in the future, when He comes again in glory to judge both the living and the dead.  And He also comes to us in the present, in Word and Sacrament.  This is particularly fulfilled in the Sacrament of the Altar, in which He is actually “present” in the Bread and Wine of Holy Communion.

That text that Leithart is considering emphasizes that Christ is with us always.  He is Immanuel, “God with us.”  And because of our union with Him by faith, we are always with God.

Counting Down and Counting Forward from History’s Turning Point

“A turning point is an event that inaugurates substantial change,” observes David  Bonagura. “The change is decisive – the future takes an unexpected path that would not have worked out otherwise.” And this turning point is what we celebrate in Advent and Christmas:  “With Advent, we prepare for the biggest turning point the universe has ever seen: the Incarnation of the Son of God.”

In his essay for the Catholic Thing, Advent: Turning Point Universe, Bonagura points out that the very way we count time testifies to this turning point;

The West’s calendar places the universe’s turning point at its center. The years of antiquity are counted downwards until His Advent – the time “before Christ.” A new era dawned at His birth – the years of our Lord, anni Domini – and time is now counted forward. The years will cease when the second Advent dawns.

Thus, I would add, our soon-to-come New Year’s holiday, though seemingly a secular observance, also testifies to this turning point by giving a new number to the year.  We will be approximately 2026 years after the turning point.

“Where the Christian sees the reconstitution of creation in Christ, nonbelievers see nothing.” Bonagura mocks how the secularists have tried to replace the numbering of our years with “B.C.” (Before Christ) and “A.D.” (anno domini, the Year of Our Lord), with “B.C.E.” (Before the Common Era) and “C.E.” (Common Era).  But what is “common” about these eras?  Ironically, of course, these new abbreviations keep the same reckoning as the Christian numbering.

The secularists have no turning point.  So some of them try to make one:

The Modern Project has been to find a new turning point of history that is not Christ. Perhaps it’s the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution, or the Sexual Revolution. Each has produced new gods: individualism, freedom, democracy, money, pleasure.

None of these gods has liberated us from the fundamental problem of the world – human sin. Only God has done that.

Retired literature professor that I am, I have to point out that “turning point” is a literary term. Every story has a plot, and every plot involves some kind of conflict. At the turning point, one side of the conflict prevails. But the story isn’t ended yet.

We have the “rising action” until the turning point, but afterwards is the “falling action,” which typically involves “reversals” (with the other side of the conflict coming back and seeming for awhile to prevail), all building up to the conclusion, often called the “epiphany,” the revelation at the grand finale, in which all is revealed, everything is tied together, and we live happily ever after.

This describes history and real life after the turning point of Christmas. There is more to come.  Christianity has setbacks and reversals, times in which it looks like the other side is winning.  But we are moving to the conclusion.  The children story formula is a prophecy.  We really will live happily ever after.

So it’s appropriate that after Advent and Christmas comes the season of Epiphany.

The Christmas Music That Is Advent Music, Revisited

Last year about this time, I posted The Christmas Music That Is Advent Music, a response to Terrence Sweeney’s piece in the Plough entitled  Not Enough Christmas Music, in which he argued, “We barely have any Christmas music at all. We have too much Advent music.”