Valson Thampu

We are into the Advent Season. Each time, this significant event in the Christian calendar comes, and goes, I feel, a tinge of melancholy, a sort of residual disappointment about how the Advent is understood and observed in our midst. Or, how stereotypically it is understood. I can’t help wondering if we haven’t turned the Advent into a contradiction of sorts: a season shorn of the keen expectation of something profound about to happen, which was, to the early Christians, the spirit of the Advent. To couch the ‘advent’ of something in the past tense is rather anomalous.

For us, the Advent is a calendar event. To our ancestors in faith, it was an affirmation of new life; indeed life abundant. In Advent, we anticipate Christmas. In Advent, they sensed Christ. And, for the Christians of the first century, the imminence of his Second Coming.

It is not hard to see what a blessing it is to be on the threshold of something profoundly meaningful and life-changing. Many of my readers would still be young, and the rest young enough in memory, to recall the sunshine and vitality of our childhood. Each day was illumined by the incandescence of expectations. Maybe, a letter from someone dear far away. Maybe, a ‘happy birthday’, next week, next month… Maybe a relative employed overseas, will return soon, his luggage bursting with gifts. . . Maybe, better days are round the corner…. There was something to look forward to: a wedding, an anniversary, a school festival, a birth, a sporting event… the list went on and on.

As years rolled by, the quiet bliss of expectations gave way to the creeping, undeviating flatness of life reduced, largely, to routine. Hills and valleys were few and far between on the terrain of life. Such as there were, were flat and familiar. Life became cyclical, predictable. An air of ennui set in. As the poet puts it, there was ‘nothing to look backward to with pride/ And nothing to look forward to with hope’.

Against this realistic background, it is easy to see what an excitement it is to live at a time surcharged with the intuition of something profound shaping up in the womb of time. It is a pity that the Jews at the time of Jesus were largely unaware that they were in the ambiance of the greatest of all Advents -the birth of the Messiah.  But then, that’s how it happens all the time; isn’t it? Events of life-transforming significance happen like the quiet opening up of a bud, and not like a deafening thunder-clap in the gray summer sky. Why? Well, because we are never ready for it. The Jews, who had for centuries awaited their Messiah in hope, didn’t have a clue that the Messiah was born in their midst. The cattle-shed, in which Jesus was born, symbolizes that logic. A Messiah born in a society’s lap of privilege, to which he is to be the Saviour, is a contradiction. It is always from the periphery -even from the wilderness beyond the periphery- that the agent of redemption arrives, like light breaking out of the heart of darkness. The people who sat in darkness, says Matthew quoting Isaiah, saw a great light. That ‘darkness’ symbolizes customary unawareness.

I have a plea to make apropos of the Advent. We must regain the fervency of the Advent; seeing it not as a calendar event, but as a vital and vibrant pulse of life. Consider the parable of the hidden treasures in the Gospel According to Matthew. Did the man, working in the field, sense the ‘advent’, if you like, of the ‘treasure’ into his life? Perhaps, he didn’t in an academic fashion. Yet, one thing is beyond doubt: he worked with expectant enthusiasm; a sort of special, joyful keenness not altogether explained by the manifest mechanics of his labour. Assuredly, many before him had worked in that field; for history doesn’t begin or end with one person. None who had preceded him worked with the intuitive involvement and inspired expectation that made his labour something more than a daily drudgery. Advent is half the Event, when it is deemed as something that just happens to you, or happens in spite of you. You are the other half of the Event.

Regard any epoch in history that produced glorious cultural treasures -Periclean Athens, Shakespeare’s England, France and the US in the years preceding the Revolutions- you find the same thing: the spirit of Advent -the attitude of eager expectation. Here’s how William Wordworth recalls the heady days of the French Revolution, ‘Blessed was in those days to have been alive/ To be young was very heaven’. It is this note of blessed, sacramental expectancy that we miss today in respect of the Advent. That, not because something has gone out of the Event, but because something has gone out of us.

Let me end by advocating a different idea of, and approach to, the Advent. Or, suggest a second Advent, if you like. The first Advent pertains to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem; or, in Nazareth, as some, including Ernest Renan, insist. The second Advent should pertain to the birth of Jesus within each one of us. And ‘Jesus’, in that sense, is the Image of God that lies, like the treasure ‘hidden’ in us, as in Jesus’s parable. Or, like the lamp, lighted but hidden under the bushel. The unveiling of that lamp, which can give light to all around us -at home and wherever we are- can happen any time. Tomorrow, if not today. So, I invite you to the Advent of Light -the light within each one of us. Remember what Jesus said?

The Kingdom of God is come, but is still coming. It is in your midst. It is within you.

Thanks to the First Advent, Jesus became the light of the world.

Through the Second Advent, let us become the light of the world.