Have you got an advent calendar yet? Growing up, I remember having one where you just opened a little door every day and that was it – no chocolate behind it or anything! Never mind some of the fancier ones available today, with various wines and spirits inside. The most expensive one I’ve seen is a £570 Dior one you can get from Harrods.
Some would say that the true meaning of advent – counting down to the birth of Jesus – has been forgotten. You might be surprised however to learn that the true meaning of advent was lost long ago – when it was first associated with Christmas!
A few years ago, Mark Forsyth, a Sunday Times bestselling author, wrote a great little book called ‘A Christmas Cornucopia’. If you’re into myth-busting, it’s a great read. You’re probably already familiar with some of it. For example, the Bible doesn’t tell us when Jesus was born, but we do know that it definitely couldn’t have been the 25th of December, because if it had been, the shepherds wouldn’t have had their sheep outside.
And did you know that the twelve days of Christmas song is actually a recipe for a Christmas dinner? One of the long-running traditions of Christmas is to eat different types of birds. Today, we tend to eat turkeys. 150 years ago it was geese. And actually, if you go back and look at the words, you’ll see it’s a list of twelve different birds, listed in descending order of size. The smaller birds would have been stuffed inside bigger ones; even the five gold rings were most likely ring-necked pheasants.
The song ‘Jingle Bells’ was originally written about the American holiday of Thanksgiving.
One thing Forsyth keeps coming back to is that there are two fairly common beliefs about the origins of Christmas. One is that it was invented by pagans, and then taken over by Christianity – the other is that it was invented by the Victorians. Charles Dickens, according to a recent film, is ‘The Man Who Invented Christmas’. Forsyth concludes that Christmas is neither pagan nor Victorian. However lot of the things we associate with Christmas today did only start in Victorian times – such as Christmas carols, which were originally pub songs, that were Christianised. But basically, what we tend to think of as Christmas is just a hodge-podge of different traditions that have come together over time.
One of the traditions he puts under the microscope is Advent. ‘Almost everybody knows that Advent is about the coming of Christmas – and almost everybody is wrong’. Why? Well as he goes on to say, the word advent certainly means coming. But originally it wasn’t talking about the first coming of Jesus, it was talking about his second coming. Not the time when he came as a baby, but the time when he will come again as judge. In fact, the traditional readings in churches for Advent Sunday are all about Judgement Day, with the stars falling from the sky, and so on.
As Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, put it in the mid-300s: ‘We preach not one advent only of Christ, but a second also, far more glorious than the first’. He goes on to spell out the contrast: ‘In his former advent, he was wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger; in his second he covers himself with light as with a garment’. In his first coming he endured the cross, despising shame, in his second he comes attended by a host of angels, receiving glory’.
And that, according to the Bible, is why Jesus’ birth matters. Because he’s coming back.
I think that at this time of year, we get a sense that we haven’t been living the way we should have been for the previous eleven months. We recognise that we’ve probably been a bit self-centred. And so we try to redeem ourselves with acts of kindness. With giving to charity. In short, with the sort of things that we should be doing all year round.
But that’s the opposite of why the Bible says Jesus came. It says that he came to redeem us, because we couldn’t redeem ourselves. He came, not primarily to be a good example, but to live and die in the place of his people. The manger was part of the journey to the cross.
His first advent was to achieve and offer salvation. And only by receiving that gift can we be ready for the real Advent.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 30th November 2023