At one level – and perhaps only at one level – the commercial world does understand something of the meaning of Advent. We give ourselves only four weeks to prepare for Christmas. The shops started way before us – the mince pies and Christmas puddings were on the shelves in October. Advent hasn’t always been only four weeks long. For the Spanish Church it used to last forty days, in France it once started on November 11th and before that it could last for as long as three months. Eastern Orthodox Christians still keep the forty day preparation, but we Christians of the West can’t be kept waiting for so long – we only give ourselves four weeks.
Where we do better than the commercial world is in not letting the cat out of the bag too soon. All the shops can do is the equivalent of looking but not touching. Carols, decorations, trees, lights, presents, food – it’s all out there to see – but we can’t have it yet. Somehow the world grasps the point that there must be a period of waiting – it would be wrong to open the carefully wrapped present now, or eat the pudding now – but why it would be wrong is not so apparent.
In Church there is less temptation. We do our best to keep Christmas out of sight – no decorations or carols until the last moment. And up till then the church is kept undecorated, the altar and the vestments are a rich but sombre purple, the music is quieter and more elegiac, the choir stops singing the Gloria and instead we hear Kyrie eleison, Lord have mercy.
Advent is a season of preparation and more importantly a season of longing – that is why so many of our hymns express the desire that God will come – the word advent means the coming or the arrival – – but come for what purpose and in what way? What sort of longing is advent all about? John Donne, 17th century poet and Dean of St Paul’s, once wrote that ‘God hath imprinted in (us) an endless and undeterminable desire of more than this life can minister unto (us). Still God leaves man in expectation.’ In the 21st century that desire seems still to be about, even in our far more affluent and advanced society. Do people find their way to church now as then because of some niggling, unsatisfied sense that there ought to be something more to life, however fortunate we may count ourselves? Is there still a kind of hunger for something that will touch some deep, scarcely articulated need in us? A longing somehow to be addressed, reassured, absolved, affirmed, challenged and changed by something above, outside, beyond the circumstances we see and know every day?
The ancient Jews were clearer about what they longed for. They longed for the restoration of paradise, but paradise in a city set on a hill, not in a garden. They longed for Jerusalem to be the focal point of justice in the world. They longed for Jerusalem to represent that wisdom and understanding that the world is in search of, so that having found it, wars would cease and all nations would live together in peace and prosperity.
Though the Church had something of the same longing for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, their expectation was not focussed on Jerusalem but on the kingship of Christ. And that they believed would come suddenly and unexpectedly. This vision of a violent and unexpected end they inherited from later Jewish thought, but by relating it to Jesus the language was transformed. With the crucifixion and the resurrection behind them so to speak they could face anything. And the way they faced it informs the way we are to keep Advent.
One powerful criticism of modern western Christianity might go like this. ‘It may be true as you have said that people find their way to church because of a need somehow to be addressed by something above, outside, beyond the circumstances we see and know every day. But when they get to church they are absorbed into a culture and community which is so comfortable that they forget or put to one side the questions they came with; they lose the longing and make do with answers they don’t really understand.’
Now if it is true – and I think it is – that as Christians we do get too comfortable with a community and a language – then Advent is the time for waking up. Advent is the time for recapturing the longing and letting go of the comfortable half-certainties. In Advent God steals our certainty. Advent points us to that side of God which not even the Son of God knew about. Advent is about facing a future which no-one, not even Jesus, could determine or make sense of, a future in which God will ambush us and take us off in directions we can never imagine.
So Advent is a season of longing but not knowing, a time of excitement and a time of giving up – giving up what is familiar, and what we make do with – and setting ourselves to search for something new and different and unfamiliar. Advent may be a time of waiting not just for presents but for the surprising spiritual gift.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker