Advent Begins in the Dark
You may or may not have grown up in a tradition that emphasised the church calendar. I didn’t. It’s only recently that I’ve grown an appreciation for the power that seasons like lent and advent have to form our apprenticeship to Jesus. But I’m new to this, and so this reflection on advent is drawn largely from the work of Anglican priest and biblical scholar Fleming Rutledge.
Rutledge talks about advent in a way that I had never heard in church before. Historically, she explains, the Church has tended to celebrate advent with less of a focus on the first coming of Jesus, and more on the second coming. Advent, she says, is the season of the second coming and the season of last things. ‘We are not looking backwards sentimentally to a baby; we are looking forward to the only One in whom the promise of peace will someday be fulfilled.’[1] I don’t think it is wrong to see advent as preparation for Christmas, but could it be that we are missing out on all God has for us when we reduce the advent season to cosiness, carols, and chocolate-fuelled countdowns?
Like no other season, advent summons us to life ‘on the edge’ – in the overlap of the ages, between the old world of death and decay and God’s new world of life and wholeness. Advent reminds Christians that we live between the decisive victory on the cross and the full consummation of that victory in the renewal of all things, when Jesus comes again. Advent invites us deeper into the tension of the ‘now and not yet,’ inviting us in the words of 2 Peter 3:12 to a posture of ‘waiting for and hastening the coming day of the Lord.’ Waiting and hastening. Patience and action, trust and hope, enduring and longing. Advent is the season to inhabit those tensions.
Advent is an invitation to show up to the darkness and recalibrate our hope.
‘Advent begins in the dark and moves towards the light – but the season should not move too quickly or glibly.’[2] True hope only comes when we show up and grieve what must be grieved in our world.
I know that my optimism bias wants to get to the resolution, the happy ending. I need advent to train me not to move too fast to hope, and not to shortcut around the reality of evil and brokenness in our world and in me.
The invitation to the darkness
‘Advent is designed to show that the meaning of Christmas is diminished to the vanishing point if we are not willing to take a fearless inventory of the darkness.’[3]
What does it look like to take a fearless inventory of the darkness? I’m sure there is no prescriptive answer, but as a starting point, I think it means reimagining discipleship around the focal points of resistance, suffering and waiting.
It means resistance. It means understanding the world as territory occupied by the enemy, and the Church as a resistance movement behind enemy lines – sabotaging the enemy’s forces of chaos and destruction with the armour of light – awaiting and anticipating the day when the reign of evil will be undone for good.[4]
It means suffering. We need to reject models of discipleship that glorify suffering, that mask saviour complexes, and that undervalue human bodies and limits.[5] But we also need to be cautious of a therapeutic Christianity that is so focussed on self-care that we end up living in curated bubbles of comfort, insulated from pain and injustice. The paradoxical promise of Jesus is that we find our life when we lose it – that we become our true selves as we give ourselves, in love, into relationship with others. And that inevitably means suffering. If we are to take a fearless inventory of the darkness and be people of compassion (which means to suffer with) there is no way we can avoid the heartbreak, the pain, the grief of encountering deep brokenness in our world.
It means waiting. Showing up to the darkness in our world – refusing to be distracted or numb – will lead us to lament – crying out to God to move, to be who he says he is, to show up where he seems absent. This is not a passive waiting – but an active waiting – energised by expectancy. We join with the groaning of creation (Romans 8:22). It is uncomfortable. But confronted with realities that are beyond our human ability to fix, perhaps the honest response is to sit in the ‘not yet’ and cry out to God for the ‘now’. Lord, have mercy.
The invitation to hope
So, we show up to the darkness. We choose not to look the other way. But advent should not form us into gloomy cynics or jaded nihilists. On the contrary, if we let it, I believe there is an invitation this season to sink our roots into the only hope that is capable of standing firm on the frontier as God’s new world collides with the powers of darkness, of encountering the worst of human brokenness and radical evil and knowing they will not have the last word. It’s the hope that what God did in Jesus’ resurrection is what God will do for all of creation when Jesus comes again.
This is not a hope in easy wins and trite platitudes. Nor is it a hope that allows us to sit back. It is a hope that is gritty and harsh, a hope that summons and energises our full participation.
‘To be a Christian is to live every day of our lives in solidarity with those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, but to live with the unshakable hope of those who expect the dawn.’[6]
Waiting and hastening. Suffering and hope. Cross and resurrection. That is the rhythm of our pilgrimage this side of new creation as proclaim Jesus’ death ‘until he comes’ (1 Cor 11.26). Could this advent be an invitation to sink our roots deeper into that story?
References
1. Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once & Future Coming of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), 342
2. Rutledge, Advent, 315
3. Rutledge, Advent, 252
4. I have reservations about using military language to describe the mission of the Church. Too easily that language plays into the hands of culture warriors and those who would abuse positions of power by justifying unacceptable behaviour because we are ‘at war.’ The New Testament authors frequently used military language – but usually in subversive ways, crucially never pitching other humans as ‘the enemy’ but always the powers and principalities (for example, Eph. 6:12).
5. We need to be especially careful not to perpetuate narratives that encourage passivity in the face of suffering – such narratives have long re-enforced the abuse and oppression of women and minority groups.
6. Rutledge, Advent, 255
