Hoping for the End in Advent

Christmas always brings out the tantrum in me, as you saw yesterday. Admonish me to keep the ‘feeling of Christmas in my heart the whole year through’ and there’s no way for me not to come unglued. It’s a personal problem, of course, and one that no one else seems to be afflicted by, but it’s also because I just totally love Advent.

Today is the first Sunday of the new church year. It marks out the first familiar step in the recapitulation of Jesus’ life. Just like you ought to be reading the same bible over and over and over, year after year after year, if you observe the church calendar in the ordering of your daily life, you get to follow along relentlessly with Jesus as he is born and dies, and, most importantly, rises again. It’s the same thing every time with little or no variation. Much like how the words on the page are always the same, the church year never changes. The only thing that changes is you. Each time you come at the text, or labor through a fast, or happen upon a feast, you are slightly different. You start out young and strong, cheerful and enthusiastic. You end up broken and aged, full of wisdom and sorrow.

Advent isn’t a feeling you can keep in your heart. How would you do that in the midst of all the Christmas bustle? And it isn’t a law either–another ecclesiastical observation leaving you wrung out by the effort.

What it is is a pause, a breath, a consideration of time. While the House and Senate struggle over their temporal responsibilities to tax the world, while we all run up and down spending and coveting, while trees are hacked down, tied up, and then lifted up and strung with thousands of tiny, pale, fleeting lights, while we try to remember the hungry, and fret about the mighty over whom we have no power nor sway, the person stopping for a few moments of Advent sees it all and takes away hope.

Not hope for more stuff, of course. Nor even for relief from the thousand inescapable crucibles that often make life completely intolerable. Nor even for the restoration of the ruin wrought by other people who can’t get their lives together any more than you can. No, you stop and hope and hope for the End, for the promised moment when God will be All in All. Every eye will see him and know him, every knee will crumble to the earth, every mouth will have to tell the truth about who he is.

It’s not cowardly to hope for the End. To look at the long impossible sweep from the helpless infant Christ all the way down to his promise to come and judge, to lament the alien strangeness of his preferred method of coping with the dark shadow obscuring our eyes–coming in poverty and ill repute to suffer and die alone and ashamed–and then to desperately fix your longing eyes on the judgement at the end.

Imagine, I mean, really, go do read the text and try to imagine what it would be like to have everything suddenly and catastrophically put to rights. The powerful and depraved suddenly falling and unable to escape admitting to their own corruption. No lawyers to step in and work out a plea deal at the eleventh hour. The abuser cast down into the dust of his own imagination. The selfish forced to see, incontrovertibly, his own wretched poverty.

And while that is going on the lowly raised up out of the ash heap. The tired limbs of the man who walks miles and miles and miles every day to work for the mighty rich suddenly enveloped in a true and perfect rest. The pinched, narrow poverty of the woman in her tin shack swept away by the restful beauty of the King. The person who suffered the cruelty and abuse of another suddenly set free and healed. Everything put right. Not a single wrong left to fester down the eternal ages.

Why doesn’t he do it now? you ask. Why keep waiting? Mary stood and saw this incredible vision so long ago. Surely we can’t endure any longer. Why doesn’t he just come?

But her answer has to be ours–the answer hidden in the depths of her dark womb, no camera to catch the spark of life, the light of the world. You can’t see him now and neither could she. But his power was so great working in her, and later working in the depths of the dark tomb, that there’s no way to let go. You can’t help but say, ‘Let it be’ and even ‘My soul proclaims.’ There’s no suffering, no circumstances, no tragedy, no death nor person that will wrench you out of his love.

You don’t have to keep him in your heart the whole year through because he is already there. He stays by his own power, in his own way, giving his own light. All the wrong that you see out there in the world is wrong inside of you, but he’s not waiting till the end to topple the corruption and eradicate the darkness. For you he’s doing it now. Where you have been selfish and treacherous and sinful he has been casting you down, not to death, but to raise you up to life.

And all while the darkness overshadows the land, and deep gloom enshrouds the people. But over you the light shines.