Advent is a penitential season, calling us to both personal and corporate repentance. Acts of confession and lament are appropriate not only for personal wrongdoing but also for the evil principalities and powers that pervade our culture.
Today in the United States, we live in a culture so profoundly pagan that Advent is no longer really noticed, much less observed. The commercial acceleration of seasons, whereby the promotion of Christmas begins even before there is an opportunity to enjoy Halloween, is superficially a reason for the vanishing of Advent. But a more significant cause is that the churches have become so utterly secularized that they no longer remember the topic of Advent. This situation cannot be blamed merely upon the electronic preachers and talkers, or the other assorted peddlers of religion that so clutter the ethos of this society, any more than it can be said simplistically to be mainly the fault of American merchandising and consumerism.
Thus, if I remark about the disappearance of Advent, I am not particularly complaining about the vulgarities of the marketplace prior to Christmas, and I am certainly not talking about getting “back to God” or “putting Christ back into Christmas” (phrases that betray skepticism toward the Incarnation). Instead, I am concerned with a single, straightforward question: In the biblical context, what is the subject of Advent?
Tradition has rendered John the Baptist an Advent figure, and if that is an appropriate connection, then clues to the meaning of the first coming of Christ may be found in the Baptist’s preaching. Listen to John the Baptist:
“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 3:2, RSV). In the gospel according to Mark, the report is, “John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1:4). Luke contains a parallel reference (Luke 3:3). It should not be overlooked, furthermore, that when John the Baptist is imprisoned, Matthew states, “From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ ” (Matt. 4:17). And later, when Jesus charges his disciples, he tells them: “And preach as you go, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’ ” (Matt. 10:7).
For all the greeting-card and sermonic rhetoric, much rejoicing does not seem to happen around Christmastime, least of all about the coming of the Lord. There is a lot of holiday frolicking, but that is not the same as rejoicing. Outbursts of either frolicking or rejoicing are premature if John the Baptist has credibility. He identifies repentance as the message and the sentiment of Advent. And in the texts just cited, that seems to be ratified by Jesus himself.
In the context of the biblical accounts, the repentance that John the Baptist preaches is no private or individualist effort, but the disposition of a person as related to the reconciliation of the whole of Creation. “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”
The eschatological reference is quite concrete. John the Baptist is warning the world, the principalities and powers as well as common people, of the impending judgment of the world in the Word of God, signaled in the coming of Christ.
There seems to be evidence in the Lukan account about John the Baptist that indicates that some of the people and, notably, the ecclesiastical officials did not comprehend his preaching, or if they did, they did not heed it, or they did not heed it promptly. Yet it is equally edifying that the political authorities, represented by Herod the tetrarch, did understand the political scope of John’s admonition of the judgment enough to imprison John and, subsequently, subject him to terrible interrogation, torture, and decapitation—a typical fate for political prisoners now, as then. When Jesus made John’s preaching his own and instructed his disciples accordingly, he foreshadowed his own arrest, trial, humiliation, crucifixion, and, for that matter, the history of the early church found in the book of Acts.
The depletion of a contemporary recognition of the radically political character of Advent is in large measure occasioned by the illiteracy of church folk about the Second Advent, and in the mainline churches, the persistent quietism of pastors, preachers, and teachers about the Second Coming. That topic has been allowed to be preempted and usurped by astrologers, sectarian quacks, and multifarious hucksters. Yet it is impossible to apprehend either Advent except through the relationship of both Advents. The pioneer Christians, beleaguered as they were because of their insight, knew that the message of both Advents is political. That message is that in the coming of Jesus Christ, the nations and the principalities and the rulers of the world are judged in the Word of God. In the Lordship of Christ, they are rendered accountable to human life and, indeed, to all created life. Hence, the response of John the Baptist, when he is pressed to who the meaning of the repentance he preaches, is “Bear fruits that befit repentance.”
In another part of the biblical literature traditionally invoked during Advent, the politics of both Advents is emphasized in attributing the recitation of the Magnificat to Mary:
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
and exalted those of low degree;
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich He has sent empty away.
(Luke 1:52–54, RSV)
In the first Advent, Christ the Lord comes into the world; in the next Advent, Christ the Lord comes as Judge of the world and of all the world’s thrones and pretenders, sovereignties and dominions, principalities and authorities, presidencies and regimes, in vindication of his Lordship and the reign of the Word of God in history. This is the truth, which the world hates, which biblical people—repentant people—bear, and by which they live as the church in the world in the time between the two Advents.