Advancing into Advent
How would you feel if it was explained that you should really attend church at least once a day through the entire course of Advent and that you should also be fasting three times a week?
This is exactly what the Council of Mâcon of 581 AD set out as the personal discipline appropriate to the pious all the way from the Feast of St Martin (November 11th) through to Christmas Day itself. This had the result that the entire period became known as “Saint Martin’s Lent,” reflecting the season’s original character as a period of ascetical preparation and penitential discipline. As such, this represented the high point of understanding the Advent season as primarily one of ascetical preparation and penitential discipline, after it first emerged gradually within the early Church (something of which the earliest formal evidence appeared in the fourth-century in the records of the Council of Saragossa in 380 AD).
The season underwent significant liturgical transformation however, during the pontificate of Gregory the Great (590-604), who reduced the Western Roman observance from six weeks to four – as it remains to this day in the West and in the Anglican calendar.
The reduced length of Advent reflected on the one hand merely the impulse to uniformity, but it also reflected the season’s spiritual intensity and its sense of tension between expectation and imminent arrival.
The word Advent itself derives from the Latin adventus, meaning “coming” or “arrival,” which points to the historic fact of the incarnation of Christ – but also in fact points in addition to Our Lord’s anticipated second coming in the parousia at the end of time – which brings out the season’s eschatological aspect also.
All of this reminds us that this season brings together for us as Anglicans ancient patristic tradition and medieval penitential practice – as this emerged through the complexities of the Reformation.
The distinctively Anglican understanding of Advent finds particular liturgical expression in the collects for each Sunday as written or adapted by Thomas Cranmer.
These collects represent a remarkable, if characteristic, achievement that reflects theological economy – in compressing complex doctrinal themes, such as the relationship between Christological incarnation, sacramental presence, and eschatological expectation—into short but lapidary expression. Cranmer wrote two original Advent Sunday collects, and translated or adapted the other two from earlier Latin material, mediated primarily through the Sarum use which itself drew from the Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries.
The Collect for the First Sunday in Advent exemplifies Cranmer’s theological method and Advent season’s eschatological focus:
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness, and put on the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.
This prayer articulates several characteristic themes, beginning with the necessity of grace, without which justification and the moral transformation entailed in the work of sanctification would have remained forever impossible. Cranmer draws imagery from Romans 13:12, and the Pauline vision of moral transformation, where we do not cast off darkness by our own power, but rather through grace received.
In addition, the collect upholds a dual Christological focus which holds together Christ’s first coming “in great humility” (as the humble servant-king as modern theologians sometimes put it) on the one hand, with the urgency entailed by the eschatological framing of Christ’s second coming on the other – when he will return in his “glorious majesty” at the “last day.”
This double aspect prevents Advent, and indeed Christmas, from ever being a mere nostalgic exercise of happy remembrance, or mere exercise in abstract speculation about the end times; when it is rather that the historical incarnation and future judgment must remain held together in mutual illumination. Thus we are called throughout Advent not only to look back to Bethlehem and forward in hope to the Parousia, but also to a season of reflection, preparation and amendment of life.
These strands articulate what medieval theology and Bernard of Clairvaux in particular, termed the “three comings” of Christ which can help us structure the theological meaning of Advent and illuminate the sacramental character of Christian existence between the ages of the past, present and future.
The first coming was the historical incarnation at Bethlehem which was the appearance of the eternal Word in human flesh, embodying thereby what theological reflection came to call the Incarnation. This coming represents not merely an historical event but rather the culmination of Old Testament expectation and the fulfilment of God’s covenantal promises. When we pray the Advent collects, we are brought into continuity with the eschatological posture of Israel itself and the foundational patriarchal hope
In the second coming meanwhile, there is what is sometimes termed the sacramental or mystical coming, which occurs in the present through the perpetual presence of Christ in Word and Sacrament.
This intermediate presence is neither simply a matter of the past nor merely of the future. It occurs most particularly in the profound mystery that is Eucharist, where Christ comes to his people in the true presence of his body and blood. Thus are we reminded of the Eucharist so much more than merely a commemoration of past events but about also present salvation and participation in the kingdom – even though that is not yet fully realized which can only happen in the Parousia.
In the words of the Anglo-Catholic E.L. Mascall, the manner in which the Eucharistic action “unites his natural body (the human nature) to his mystical body (the Church)” is such, “that the latter may feed on, and be perfected by, the blessings of the former.”
The third coming is indeed, that eschatological return in glory that is the parousia, when Christ shall appear “in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead,” fulfilling the Nicene Creed’s affirmation echoing the Old Testament that “his kingdom will have no end.” This future Advent stands in stark contrast to the humility of the first coming, yet it remains inseparably connected to it.
All of this illustrates the theological richness of the Advent season and the deep Christology that is encoded in the Advent collects that are so important to us as Anglicans. Thus are we helped to refuse any separation between the Christ who came in vulnerability as the newborn babe of Bethlehem and the Christ who shall come in power and glory at the end of time and thus comprises the ultimate substance of our hope.