So how are your Christmas preparations
coming along? Do you have your tree up and decorated? Do you have your Christmas lights hung, beautifully
illuminating the night? Is your house or
apartment bedecked with all of the various Christian items that you have
collected over the years, or have been passed down in your family? Do you have your Christmas shopping done?
We
exert so much effort during the month of December (and truth be told, some of
us even start before Thanksgiving!) in order to get ready for Christmas. Yet what if it turns out that all of this
work was completely and utterly pointless? What if it turns out that there
is no Christmas this year?
The
focus during December is on Christmas.
But in the Church, until the evening of December 24, December is not
about Christmas. Instead, it is the season
of Advent. The name Advent is
derived from the Latin world adventus which means “arrival” or coming.
Advent prepares us to celebrate the arrival of our Savior Jesus Christ as he
was not only conceived by the Holy Spirit, but also born of the virgin
Mary. It prepares us to celebrate the
incarnation as the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14).
Advent
prompts us to think about why God sent forth his Son into the world in
the fullness of time (Galatians 4:4).
The one year lectionary establishes this in a beautiful way as the
Gospel lesson for the First Sunday in Advent (Matthew 21:1-9) describes Jesus’
entrance into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday at the beginning of Holy Week. The first thing we hear about is Jesus
entering the city in order to die on the cross.
We are reminded that Jesus’ arrival was caused by our sin, and God’s
gracious and merciful plan to give us forgiveness. The world treats December as a time of
merriment, but we cannot observe Advent without confronting the sin that is
present in our lives. We cannot avoid the
reason that the Son of God entered into this world – our sin. Advent will
always be a time that calls us to repentance.
Jesus
Christ died on the cross as the ransom for our sin (Matthew 20:28). Our Lord
won forgiveness for us. Yet from the start,
God said that sin would bring death (Genesis 2:16-17). It did (Genesis 3:19;
5:5) and the apostle Paul tells us that it has ever since (Romans 6:23). God raised Jesus from the dead on the third
day. Jesus passed through death in order
to defeat it. God raised Jesus as the
firstfruits of the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:20-23). After winning forgiveness and defeating death
in a resurrected body that can never die again (Romans 6:9), our Lord then
ascended into heaven as He was exalted by God to His right hand (Acts 2:33-35;
1 Peter 3:21-22).
However,
at His ascension the angels announced, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who
was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you
saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11).
Jesus himself had spoken of this future return: “And
then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and
great glory” (Luke 21:27). Advent leads
us to the recognition that we cannot think about our Lord’s first coming,
without also thinking about his second coming. Advent is the season that reminds us that there
may be no Christmas this year. In
fact, it leads us to pray that there won’t be one. It prompts us to pray: Come Lord Jesus!
So during
Advent we prepare to celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. We prepare to celebrate the miracle of the
incarnation. We do so knowing why the
Son of God entered into our world, and what he did for us through his death and
resurrection. We do so knowing that the
risen, ascended and exalted Lord will return on the Last Day. If Jesus Christ
is the focus of our preparations in this way, then even if our Lord returns and
there is no Christmas, everything we will have done during December will have
been truly beneficial preparation.
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