Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ

by Fleming Rutledge

The fact is that each of these “either/ors” are really “both/ands.” And it is precisely because we cannot eliminate one or the other but must hold them in tension that we have inherited “a season under stress” [Richard Hoefler] . . . shaped by darkness and light, dread and hope, judgment and grace, second and first comings, terror and promise, end and beginning.

“Get up,” says Christ to the benumbed disciples, “let us be going.” So let us also go with eager attentiveness to each new day. We are expected.

“While there is scant hope of changing the culture around us, the Church need not be a fellow traveler. The call is for the Church to reclaim for the sake of its own life and mission Advent’s focus on the reign of God and, in so doing, to hone once again the counter-cultural edge of the Gospel at the very beginning of the liturgical year.”

An exclusive emphasis on Advent as a season of preparation risks putting human endeavor in the spotlight for all four weeks of the season. All the Advent preparation in the world would not be enough unless God were favorably disposed to us in the first place.

Advent, however, differs from the other seasons in that it looks beyond history altogether and awaits Jesus Christ’s coming again “in glory to judge the living and the dead.”14 In the cycle of seasons and festival days that takes the church through the life of Christ, it is Advent that gives us the final consummation; it is the season of the last things.

The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.

Their grief had been acknowledged. More memorably still, it had been acknowledged and shared by a king.

The symbolism of Diana was this: she was seen as one who was willing to lay aside her princely prerogatives to come alongside those who are downtrodden.

I bring them together here simply to show that in spite of our democratic instincts, the royal archetype is undimmed in the collective unconscious.

That capacity, the doctor emphasized, cannot be faked. When it is offered generously and unstintingly by a beautiful young woman who is the living embodiment of everyone’s image of a fairy princess, the impact is astonishing.

We were speaking of archetypes; something greater than archetypes is here. We were speaking of the strength of symbolism; something stronger than symbolism is here.

it seems to me, is that we have concentrated so much on the stooping that we have lost sight of the royalty. More than half of the biblical message is thereby eliminated, for it is the combination that counts.

The God who is so terrifying that we must hide our faces from his resplendence is the same God who has come down to deliver his people in their extremity. That is the secret.

. . . We are afraid Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void. This is the Abomination. This is the Wrath of God.

Pascal and Auden both interpret it as silence—Deus absconditus.

“For me, one of the worst things would be if I woke up one day and said to people, ‘I think apartheid is not so bad.’ For me, this would be worse than death.” This is surely a clue to understanding the wrath of God. A god who remained silent in the face of atrocities would not be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob or the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Argentine president Menem, clearly afraid of more revelations, has urged former military executioners and torturers to confess in private to priests, calling on the country not to look back, to “move forward.”2 It will not do. Bishop Tutu has shown the world that the only way forward is the way through.

A failure of imagination was at work in this excision. Jettisoning the references to God’s wrath deprives us of the good news that his wrath has been turned away. The lovely verse 10 has naturally been retained (“Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other”), but the prior omissions have robbed us of an opportunity to understand that righteousness and peace cannot kiss until “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against . . . those who by their wickedness suppress the truth”

Advent is the season of the uncovering: “Bear fruit that befits repentance. . . . Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees”! This is the right time to root out the cover-ups in our own lives, as we wait with bated breath for the lights to come on and the announcement of the angel that God is not against us but for us.

This face of Advent is that of the apocalyptic woes, the tribulation that overtakes all who stand their ground in the place of greatest pressure as the age to come pushes against “the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away”

Rather, the emphasis should be evenly divided between “flee” and “wrath to come,” so as to indicate the gravity of the coming judgment upon the godly and ungodly alike.

This in itself is ironic, because even as we rejoice to subvert bourgeois values, we have somehow managed to enshrine them at the same time.

As secular critic Northrop Frye wrote appreciatively in The Great Code, “The simplicity of the Bible is the simplicity of majesty.”

Advent, however, remains, with its paradoxical combination of waiting and hastening (II Pet. 3:12), suffering and joy, judgment and deliverance, apocalyptic woe and eschatological hope. It is the combination that counts. This is the way Christians live now, for “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it” (John 1:5 REB).

The question that is up for grabs is, Who was “crucified under Pontius Pilate”? Everybody who speaks of Jesus of Nazareth, thinks of him, prays in his name, or (increasingly) uses his name as an expletive will be taking a position with regard to this, whether the person consciously realizes it or not.

The one thing that matters, I think, is that we should ask ourselves about the single most fundamental affirmation in the story. Did God act? That question has two facets: Did God act? and did God act?

Karl Barth wrote that the church’s creedal affirmation of the virginal conception is the “doctrine on guard . . . at the door of the mystery of Christmas.”5 Matthew and Luke have both posted guards at the entrances to their Gospels: “Danger: God at work.” Are these purely literary devices? Did it “really happen”? If not, what do we need to know?

As the millennium turns, this Christmastide will be another blessed opportunity for bearing witness unashamedly to the church’s ancient faith that very God of very God really happened here.

“The Incarnation is like a dagger thrust into the weft of human history” (Edwyn Hoskyns). Let not the celebrated literary power of the stories themselves obscure this truth: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

The first three Sundays of Advent speak of an adult Christ and the future reign of God, not of an infant born in the past. Only on the fourth Sunday of Advent do we turn back to the event of annunciation, and then on Christmas Eve to the birth of the Christ child.

A similar split in our sensibility is apparent in Christian bookstores and church gift shops where an austere Byzantine icon will be displayed next to an angel that looks like a Barbie doll.

But in a culture like ours, where parents have very little time to spend with their actual children, and where an obsessive pursuit of youth has caused an 800 percent increase in cosmetic surgical procedures in ten years, a focus on becoming childlike at Christmas seems guaranteed to skew the message of the incarnation.

However, if the children get the idea that Christmas is entirely for them, that there are no privileges reserved for their maturity, it does not seem likely that their faith will unfold in the direction of Good Friday.

A famous painting of the annunciation in the Cloisters in New York shows the embryonic Jesus slipping down a shaft of sunlight toward Mary—and he is already carrying his cross. This is the hidden message of the manger.

Maturing as a Christian means making sacrifices, delaying gratification, setting the needs of others ahead of one’s own, pursuing distant goals instead of temptations ready at hand. In these stress-filled times, virtually all of us, as we get older, will seek relief by visiting, in our imaginations, a childhood Christmas of impossible perfection. These longings are powerful and can easily deceive us into grasping for a new toy, new car, new house, new spouse to fill up the empty spaces where unconditional love belongs.

Our longings are powerful, our needs bottomless, our cravings insatiable, our follies numberless. For those who cannot or will not look deeply into the human condition, sentiment and nostalgia can masquerade as strategies for coping quite successfully for a while—but because it is all based on illusion and unreality, it cannot be a lasting foundation for generations to come.

in the very midst of our human selfishness, the waylaying love of God has broken through to us unconditionally.

The specific content of Christian hope, therefore, forms an antidote to all Christian egoism and privatization of bliss so common in American celebrations of the instant immortality of the individual soul after death.

As my husband was brooding over a recent horror story in the newspaper, he suddenly observed, as if out of the blue, “No wonder God had to send his Son into the world.” Yes. Ultimately, this is the only hope we have. But where do we see Christ in the world? “Thou hast hid thy face,” writes Isaiah. Where do we discover the hope that is the preeminent Advent theme? Is there any real basis for hope?

In Suffering and Hope he puts forth his belief that traditional answers can be inadequate and even cruel.

The thought of God subjecting Lisa to such indescribable torment for pedagogical reasons is monstrous, inadmissible.

Advent is the right time for the asking of hard questions. Advent comes to a climax, not only on Christmas Day but also in the massacre of the innocents by Herod. The church has historically observed the Feast of the Holy Innocents on December 27, a remarkable conjuncture that remembers a massacre of infants in the same season that we rejoice in the birth of Christ. The great theme of Advent is hope, but it is not tolerable to speak of hope unless we are willing to look squarely at the overwhelming presence of evil in our world. Malevolent, disproportionate evil is a profound threat to Christian faith.

“What we really need is not some intellectually acceptable answer to life’s most mysterious conundrum about God’s action or inaction. The need is for God and the nurture of the expectation of his coming to be coupled with the patience to wait for him to come in his own time. The waiting is not easy. In his reflection on the death of his first wife, Martin Marty wrote of waiting as a time of praying what he describes as the ‘Cry of Absence’ [protesting the apparent silence of God] found so often in the Psalms.”

Sooner or later, being a profoundly biblical theologian above all, Barth was bound to come upon the motif of apocalyptic hope.

Christians are not lifted out of the world into a life free from pain and danger. “Jesus has not yet uttered his last Word,” Barth writes, until he comes again “to complete his revelation” (IV/3.2, 218).

For many years, I thought that, during Advent, one was supposed to pretend that Jesus hadn’t been born, so that we would be more excited when Christmas came.

In Advent, we don’t pretend, as I once thought, that we are in the darkness before the birth of Christ. Rather, we take a good hard look at the darkness we are in now, facing and defining it honestly, so that we will understand with utmost clarity that our great and only hope is in Jesus’s final victorious coming.

Christians are a relatively small, besieged minority in the world.

nevertheless our own unrighteousness and unholiness are, as Barth writes, “still behind [us] in ever new forms and with only too powerful a grasp” (IV/3.2, 232).

The judgment of Christ upon our witness as Christians still lies ahead.