The church’s life in Advent is hidden with Christ until he comes again, which explains why so much of what we do in this night appears to be failure, just as his life appeared to end in failure. If Jesus is the Son of God, he is also the One who, as we learned last Sunday, identifies himself with “the least, the last, and the lost,”3 who takes their part, who is born into the world as a member of the lowest class on the social ladder and identifies himself with our human fate all the way to the end, as he gives himself up to die the brutal, shameful, and dehumanizing death of a slave.
