THE COMING OF CHRIST IN THE INCARNATION

In Advent we intentionally join our brothers and sisters in the Old Testament who waited faithfully for the Messiah to come. We seek to enter their perspective and take on their posture. Of course, we live our lives in AD, in the year of our Lord, not BC. But “Advent itself is always BC!” writes Malcolm Guite. “The whole purpose of Advent is to be for a moment fully and consciously Before Christ.”3

We know that Christ has come, and yet the season of Advent calls us out of our time-bound moment to remember and perform the whole drama of Scripture. Through the liturgical calendar we don’t merely retell the story of the gospel; we enter it. In this way the church calendar is like immersive theater.4

In immersive theater, no one is simply a spectator watching a play. The distinction between actors and audience is broken down and everyone becomes a character in the story. In the same way, in Advent we join the people of Israel waiting for the coming Messiah. We reenact their yearning for and anticipation of the coming king. Though we now know the story of Christmas—the story of Jesus’ first coming—we imaginatively enter into the confusion, longing, frustration, and sense of dreams deferred that the people of Israel felt year after year, generation after generation. We prepare for the joy of Christmas by waiting on the dark streets of Bethlehem, our eyes straining to glimpse the dawning of that everlasting light.

In the book of Luke, Jesus has a strange exchange with the Sadducees where he points out that Moses called the Lord “the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Jesus says, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Luke 20:37-38). Because “to him all are alive,” the God we worship is still the God of Abraham, still the God of Isaac, still the God of Jacob. So even though we live two thousand years after Jesus’ birth, it is appropriate—even vital—for us to join in the ache of these Old Testament saints, not only in our imaginations but through the mysterious reality of the communion of saints across time. When we participate in the season of Advent we are taking part in the corporate longing of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Rahab, Moses, Miriam, Isaiah, and Ruth. We are bearing their burdens and their stories.

In the medieval church, as the season of Advent was taking shape, Christians developed a pattern of praying together seven prayers that reference descriptions of the Messiah from the Old Testament. These prayers are poetry, telling us what Christ is like through metaphor without saying the name of Jesus directly. Instead they call to Jesus using other names given in Scripture: “O Wisdom!” “O Adonai!” “O Root!” “O Key!” “O Light!” “O King of the Nations!” “O Emmanuel!”

These are called the “O Antiphons” because the church sang these prayers antiphonally, back and forth, by call and response. They are now sung by some churches on the seven days leading up to Christmas Eve. Many churches, however, have lost this ancient practice, but an echo of the tradition remains in the beloved Advent hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which is taken from the final O Antiphon.

These poetic prayers reverberate with longing and hope. They tell us we need a rescuer and a ransom. They remind us that, even if we had never heard the name of Jesus, we would still need all he came to give. We need “wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High.” We need Adonai—the Lord—to “come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.” We need the root of Jesse to nourish us. We need the key of David to unlock the chains that imprison us. We need the rising dawn, “the radiance of the Light eternal and Sun of Justice.” We need the king of the nations, the deepest “desire of all.” And we need Immanuel, God with us.5

The O Antiphons remind us that the first coming of Christ should not be taken for granted, nor should its significance be consigned to the past. All the groaning of creation, all the tragedies and miseries of history, all the confusion and ignorance that characterized humanity before Christ remain with us now, even in the age of our Lord. There are billions of people today who, like those in the Old Testament, have never heard the story of Jesus. And we who have heard and believed the good news often find ourselves mired in fear, unbelief, sin, and sorrow. Because of this, we not only recall those who waited for Christ; we join with them each year to tell of the one who answers the yearning of every human heart and the desire of every nation.

The longing of Advent begins in the first pages of the Bible. In Genesis we watch with horror as sin enters the world through the rebellion of Adam and Eve. Poison is poured into the stream of humanity and death breaks loose on the earth. The wreckage is devastating and pervasive. Because of the fall there is brokenness in our bodies, in our interior lives, in our relationships with each other, in nature, in culture, and in societal systems. Our desires have become disordered and discordant, and we are now at odds with others and with God himself.

Then, in Genesis 3:15, there is the first whisper of hope:

Theologians calls this the protevangelion, the first gospel, which foreshadows the good news to come. It is the first hint that, though everything seems shattered beyond repair, God has not left us. Help is on the way. Generation after generation, through the promises of Abraham, the enslavement of the Jewish people, the deliverance of the exodus, through prophets and psalms, through the establishment and destruction of the temple, through exile and return, the people of God waited for God’s anointed.

Slowly—painfully slowly—promises were unveiled to God’s people of one who was coming whose kingdom would have no end. And slowly the people of Israel realized that these promises were not only for their own rescue but for all nations, ethnicities, and people groups. They waited and hoped, not knowing what was to come, unable to skip to the end of the book, unable to see what lay ahead.

Advent is a time to ready ourselves for the celebration of the incarnation, and this is no small task. The way we celebrate Christmas can easily become sentimental and trite. We are so familiar with the story—the little lambs and the shepherds, the Christmas star and the stockings—that we fail to notice the depth of pain, chaos, and danger of the world into which Jesus was born.6 Christmas with its compulsory jollification and insistence on being the “hap-hap-happiest...