The Hope and Darkness of Advent

Bonnie Kristian

Paris Orlando/Wikimedia Commons
December 8, 2019



Christmas is coming, but it is not yet.

Commercially, of course, this year's Christmas season is already long in the tooth. But if you are a Christian in a tradition which keeps the full Western liturgical calendar (and not all traditions do), it has yet to begin. Advent is the four Sundays before Christmas Day, the season of preparation for Christmas, for re-enacting the anticipation of God's rescue of humanity that starts with the birth of Jesus. It is a time of expectation rather than fulfillment, of longing rather than joy. It is the season for waiting.

Coming to this as we do, two millennia after the fact, it is difficult — for me, anyway — to feel this wait as real. I can't pretend I don't know the end of the story. I've heard its spoilers my whole life. And I am not by nature sentimental: The Christmas tree in our home is a concession to my marriage, not something I'd bother with on my own. (Among my earliest memories is when, at 3, I took my mother up on her threat to cancel Christmas if I continued to refuse to dress for the Christmas Eve service — and considered it a fair bargain.) But while I struggle to share in the Advent wait for Christ's first coming, I have no such difficulty participating in its dual anticipation of his return. And the yearning that entails is a yearning I think we all share, whether or not you're a Christian in an Advent tradition, or even a Christian at all.


It is, most basically, a yearning for justice. I don't mean the unsatisfactory justice we habitually encounter, the justice of courts and cops and prison. I don't mean anything so empty as retribution, which as the subject of yearning nearly always takes the uglier form of revenge.

The justice Christians hope for in the return of Jesus is far more than that. It is no sterile terror, no cruel machine that gnaws the innocent and guilty alike. It is the sense — more than that, the reality — that all is as it should be. It is as small as a perfect dinner with loved ones and as grand as the greatest wrongs of history coming under divine judgment, their victims finally, fully made whole. It is God dwelling among his people on a renewed Earth, where "there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." It is the redemption of everything, not only humanity, as "creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God."

It is an end to war and terrorism and abuse, yes, but also to the suffering of animals and the disfigurement of our planet. It is the realization of our hope that darkness will be broken by light, that death, evil, and oppression will not have the final word.

It may be tempting, when reading this, to say, "Well, that's all very nice, and naturally I would like that too, but that's not the real world. It's just a fairy tale for adults, or perhaps a falsely pious excuse to avoid the work of justice now, to imagine a future when God fixes it all for us so we are not responsible for fixing it ourselves." And that reaction would be very understandable, because too often Christians have used our expectation of Jesus returning in exactly that manner. There are even distorted theologies which explicitly make this move, condoning callousness about poverty because, in this age, "the poor you will always have with you" or dismissing concern over environmental destruction because "the Earth is going to be all burned up anyway. It's in the Bible."


But it's not, not like that, anyway. What the Bible describes, albeit in poetic, apocalyptic language very difficult for us to read in a culture which has lost the genre of apocalypse, is not "the abandonment of the present world, but rather its fulfillment," as N.T. Wright, a New Testament scholar who is among the most important living Christian theologians, has explained. "You don't liberate something by destroying it," Wright continues. "All the beauty, all the goodness, all the pulsating life of the present creation, is to be enhanced, lifted to a new level, in the world that is to be. ... [So] there is a strong incentive to work, in the present, to anticipate the new world in every possible way."

The occupation of those who live in this hope of justice is not to muck things up so God has more to make right. It is to work with God toward that good end, to act now, insofar as it is possible, as the sort of people we will be then. And I'd submit the appeal of this narrative is not an item of evidence for its falsehood: If the hope Advent offers is real, we would quite expect to find a longing for it in every human heart.

Advent, then, is a season of hope and darkness. It is a season which looks unflinchingly at the evil that now besets us and stubbornly insists its days are numbered. And then the joy of Christmas comes, bringing with it a gaiety which, T.S. Eliot tells us, must "not be forgotten in later experience/In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium/The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure," so that our "accumulated memories of annual emotion/May be concentrated into a great joy/Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion/When fear came upon every soul:/Because the beginning shall remind us of the end/And the first coming of the second coming."

Christmas is coming, but it is not yet. Advent bids us wait, declaring justice is not yet either, but it will just as surely come.

Oswald Chambers

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. 2 Corinthians 4:16

God has allowed the finger of decay to come to your body and lay you completely aside, and you begin to see what a slight hold you have on life, and the thought comes -- "Well, I expect I will have to cave in. I have not the strength I once had; I can never do the things I thought I would for God."

It may come in a hundred and one ways and you realize that the outward man is wasting, that you have not the might you once had, and this is where the cowardly surrender is apt to come in - only we give it another name. The great craze today is to be healthy - "a sound mind in a sound body." Very often the soundest minds have not been in sound bodies, but in very shaky tabernacles, and the word comes "though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.

Paul faces the possibility of old age, decay, and death with no rebellion and no sadness. Paul never hid from himself the effect which his work had upon him; he knew it was killing him, and, like his Master, he was old before his time; but there was no whining and no retiring from the work. Paul was not a fool; he did not waste his energy ridiculously, neither did he ignore the fact that it was his genuine apostolic work and nothing else that was wearing him out. Every wasting of nerve and brain in work for God brings a corresponding uplifting and strengthening to spiritual muscle and fiber. 

If the outward man is perishing because of an injudicious waste of physical strength or because of wrong habits, then it will always make us faint, or cave in; and if we give up prayer and communion with God, then the decay goes on to a terrible extent; there is no corresponding inward weight of glory, no inner winging.

The apostle Paul continually had external depression, he had agonies and distresses, terrible persecution and tumults in his life, but he never had the "blues," simply because he had learned the secret that the measure of the inner glory is the wasting of the outward man. The outer man was being wasted. Paul knew it and felt it but the inner man was being renewed. Every wasting meant a corresponding winging on the inside. Some of us are so amazingly lazy, so comfortably placed in life, that we get no inner winging. The natural life, apart altogether from sin, must be sacrificed to the will and the word of God, otherwise there is no spiritual glory for the individual. With some of us the body is not wearing away. Our souls are stagnant and the vision spiritually is not getting brighter. But once we get into the heavenlies, live there, and work from that standpoint, we find we have the glorious opportunity of spending all our bodily energies in God's service and corresponding weight of moral and spiritual glory remains all the time. No matter how wearied or expended the body may be in God's work, there is the winging of the inner man into a higher grasp of God.

We have to beware of the pagan notion that our spirit develops in spite of our body; it develops with our body, and the way that spiritual insight develops in the worker is, as Paul states here, in the wasting of energy for God, because in this way the inner man is renewed. It is not a question of saying "Oh, my body is so lazy, I must drag it up to do something," but a question of working on God's line to the last lap, spending and being spent for one purpose only, and that purpose God's. If we put the body and the concerns of the body before the eternal weight of glory, we will never have any inner winging at all. We will always be asking God to patch up this old tabernacle and keep it in repair. But when the heart sees what God wants, and knows that the body must be willing to spend and be spent for that cause and that cause alone, then the inner man gets wings.

Oswald Chambers, The Love of God