The Threat of Advent

The joys and sorrows of the Christmas season are too often overshadowed by the all-too-often asphyxiating demands of events and consumerism that drown out this time of year. In case you hadn’t heard, lots of stuff gets in the way of Jesus during Christmas time. More elusive during this season than just about anything else is the time needed to sit in the quiet and ponder the coming of God in the form of a baby. The American is often far too busy to ponder and meditate on the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

For many global Christians, the season of Advent represents the “high time” of the church calendar. In the Western church—particularly among Protestants and Roman Catholics—special attention is typically given to Holy Week (and its culmination in Good Friday and Easter Sunday), signaling the glorious climax of the Christian year. However, in the Eastern church, particularly Eastern Orthodoxy, the emphasis is less placed on the death and resurrection of Jesus as the peak liturgical moment of the year. Instead, the incarnation and the coming of God as a baby stands as the pinnacle of worship and celebration. The incarnation, for many, is the high point of human history.

That means Christmas! There is wisdom in retrieving and reviving this emphasis. There’s good reason many Christians throughout church history and tradition have been persuaded to see the coming of God as the grand finale of the liturgical calendar. And it is likely that seeing the importance of Advent has equal importance in our spiritual formation. The coming of God challenges us. We see this in the birth stories of Jesus. In Matthew's infancy narratives, the apostle presents a fascinating juxtaposition of two characters: the Magi and King Herod. Both are depicted as “searching” for Jesus. But their intentions couldn’t be more different. The Magi—those mysterious travelers from the East—have followed a distant, exotic star to the place where they can bring Christ their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The emperor Herod, on the other hand, is also “searching” for Jesus. But for another reason. He looks for Jesus with the intent to have him killed. 

Why would a baby be threatening to a Roman ruler? 

The baby represented a profound existential threat to Herod; which made him skittish (if not terrified) about this child. While the Magi come to worship the child, Herod comes to kill him, fully aware that this baby challenges his power, prestige, and rule. In a way, these two figures embody two paradigms for living: Are we searching for Jesus as the center of our existence, or are we placing ourselves at the center—seeing Jesus as a threat to be removed? The Magi seek to worship him; Herod seeks to eliminate him.

Matthew’s juxtaposition of these two characters is likely his attempt at evoking within his readers an unwavering conviction that all will be drawn to Jesus—both for right and wrong reasons. So also with us. The Gospels don’t invite us just to be seekers of Jesus alone. Herod did that. We are called to seek Jesus in a particular kind of way for a particular kind of purpose and intent. Some (like Herod) apparently sought Jesus to use him, to manipulate his message for our own purposes, or simply to do away with him. But that kind of “searching” is not the kind he seeks out of love and worship. We seek him to bend our lives to him, his way, and his message. Some turn to Jesus that he might bend to the self. 

Others turn to Jesus to bend their ever being to his Being. 

Christmas threatens our self-centeredness. And our allusions and idolatries around power and influence. It is possible that in this way Christmas represents a threat to many of us who live in the West. For at Christmas, we don’t come and bow down to the victorious king. Rather, we come to worship the humble babe. Which is not the kind of king the flesh would want. The French Christian François Fénelon (1651-1715) gave voice to the propensity of the church to overly focus on Good Friday and Easter than the days of Advent and the motivations therein: 

Most of us would prefer to die with Jesus in his agony than to see ourselves lying in swaddling clothes alongside him in the cradle. Being little horrifies us more than dying, because death can be suffered through a standard of courage and greatness. It is torture to no longer be able to count ourselves as anything. It is torture to fall back into childhood, as do some older people who are victims of dementia, people whom hard-hearted children make fun of. It is torture to see, with clear and penetrating vision, how worthy of disdain is this state. All these things are the most intolerable kind of torture for a great and generous soul, one that would take comfort from every other kind of hardship by making use of its courage and its learning. 

Fénelon goes so far as to describes it “torture” to imagine God in a childlike, infantile state. Doesn’t the fact that God was once a babe challenge nearly everything we expect from him? We long for a God who kicks butt and takes names, a divine father who delivers justice to our enemies. We desire a creator who speaks and acts precisely as we wish. Yet, in the babe, we encounter none of that. Instead, we are given the vulnerable, the humble, the babbling, and the God who wakes in the middle of the night.

Christmas is a gift to us, grounding us and reminding us of our fragile, fleeting existence. Advent, like Jesus himself, is a challenge to our power—just as he was a threat to Herod’s. It calls us, once more, to come and lay down our greatest treasures before the child, leaving our delicate, tenuous authority at the door.

Christmas is a threat to me. And it is a threat to all the assumptions we may have concocted as to what and who we think God should be and do. 

Merry Christmas,
A.J. & Quinn Swoboda