In the Liturgical Calendar, Advent is a period of preparation, extending over four Sundays, before Christmas. The word Advent comes from the Latin advenio, “to come to,” and refers to the coming of Christ.
For Christians, the season of Advent anticipates the coming of Christ from two different perspectives. You might see Advent as a set of bookends.
The first shares in the ancient longing for the Messiah which happened historically in Bethlehem. The second reflects upon the promise of Christ’s Second Coming which is still future.
C. S. Lewis referred to this first coming of Christ to our world as a child born of a virgin as “The Grand Miracle.” Of this he said: “The Incarnation is the grand miracle of all from which all other miracles stem from or lead up to” (Miracles). Lewis also saw a cosmic implication to this event: “What had happened on Earth, when [God] was born a man at Bethlehem, had altered the universe forever ” (Perelandra).
One of the accounts of this momentous event is recorded in the second chapter of Luke. Its content is very familiar to us from its frequent reading at Christmas time (See: Luke 2:1-25). The Bible also tells us that the little baby grew to manhood and then began His public ministry of teaching and working miracles. But Christ’s ultimate mission was to die on a cross as atonement for sin and then rise from the dead. This was the first fruits of a new sphere of existence which will be ushered in as a New Heaven and a New Earth.
51 Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. 53 For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality (1 Corinthians 15:51-57).
16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18).
Some have raised the skeptical question of why the long delay before Christ’s return. Lewis responded to this in his classic apologetic work Mere Christianity:
“Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is He not landing in force, invading it? Is it that He is not strong enough? Well, Christians think He is going to land in force; we do not know when. But we can guess why He is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have though much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right: but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else -something it never entered your head to conceive- comes crasing in; something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left? For this time it will be God without disguise; something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it” (Mere Christianity).
The Advent of Christ presents us with a decision. How will we respond to the gospel claim that God became a man and died and rose for our redemption? In what ways might you use Christmas and Easter as a means of presenting unbelievers with that decision?