Advent is the hope of redemption, sung in minor key. It is the promise of resurrection, and the sorrow of that hope not yet fulfilled. In this the midnight of the liturgical year, these few weeks before we celebrate the birth of Christ, we confront a world not yet reborn and embody what Saint Paul calls the ‘hope against hope,’ a hope that endures when the world says it should not. A hope that looks back to the birth of our savior, and forward to His coming again, when all will be made new.
‘Advent begins in the dark,’ writes priest and author Fleming Rutledge. The liturgical calendar does not begin with the birth of Christ on Christmas Day. Instead, it begins here, in the deepest night before the dawn, when we wait for the coming of the promised Messiah.
At times, God hides himself from us. He is, as Saint Thomas Aquinas described, ‘Deus absconditus.’ For two thousand years, through wars and famine, the uncertainty of illness and pang of death, He has bid us wait, and the church has settled into the long night. Nowhere is this reflected more clearly than in the hymns we sing during this season of longing:
‘Come Thou fount of every blessing
Hither by thy help I’ve come.’
‘Come Thou long expected Jesus
Born to set thy people free.’
‘O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here.’
Come.
These hymns hold well our joy and sorrow, and in them we remember that God will hold both as well. They sing of our ultimate resurrection, yet leave room for the desperation that our lives often embrace in the present. The promise of rebirth gives us hope that the night will not endure, and yet this time in between redemption and resurrection is full of loss. We cry out ‘how long O Lord?’
‘…To those who have seen
The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,
The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.’
— W.H. Auden
The season of Advent reminds us that our wait in ‘the time being’ is long and often painful, yet we also remember there is a light in the darkness, a spark of hope that lends strength to the long-suffering, and a promise that the dawn is coming. And so, while we wait, we sing:
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel, shall come to you, O Israel.’
[A version of this article was originally published on Medium.]
