Still and Holy Silence

Beauséant and Buckler—1 December AD 2022

Scripture Passage: “Keep awake, therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” —Matthew 24:42-44

Challenge Message: “In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You are aware of the beating of your heart. The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.” —Frederick Buechner

Advent: A Still and Holy Silence

The liturgical year of the Western Church begins anew at Advent, the season of four Sundays preceding the Nativity of Our Lord. It is a time of hope and expectation, of preparing our hearts and our homes for the King. In it, we await and we watch for light amidst the dark.

When it comes to Yuletide celebrations, the Church often seems out of step with the surrounding culture. We laugh, a bit bitterly, regarding the appearance of Christmas decorations even before Halloween. My children cast covetous eyes upon those homes which have decorated their trees well ahead of Thanksgiving.

And who could blame the advance guard? Perhaps you may be one yourself. It’s been a rough few years, a rough couple of decades. Who am I to begrudge someone their joy? If Christmas makes you happy, well, it makes me happy too. And we could all use some good holiday cheer both early and often.

Yet Advent offers to us something a little different, something more than simply delayed gratification or finger-waving legalism. Advent offers hope, and peace, and silence. Advent offers the joy of quiet expectation in contradistinction to the frenzied holiday rush with which our culture shares such a love-hate relationship.

There’s a reason why most of us cease our festivities and lower our trees so quickly after Christmas Day. We’ve had enough, an entire December of Yuletide overload. Forget the Twelve Days of Christmas, let alone the greater winter celebration that used to stretch to Candlemas (2 February). We rush to get to the holiday, then we rush to get away.

Take a moment. Take a breath. Close your eyes. Adventus means “arrival,” a coming towards. It derives from the Greek parousia, meaning “presence”; originally the visitation of a king or dignitary to a city. Christians use this term to refer to the ways in which God comes to us, reveals Himself to us, in Jesus Christ. The season of Advent possesses threefold significance: it looks for Christ’s presence in the past (historical), the present (liturgical), and the future (eschatological). Or, more pithily, Jesus arrives in history, mystery, and majesty.

Historically, Jesus Christ is the babe born in Bethlehem upon a Christmas morn, the most obvious association that we have with Advent today. But it also refers to the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans in AD 70, which Jesus repeatedly predicted in His “little apocalypse,” when no Temple stone would be left atop another.

Liturgically, Christ comes to us today in Word and in water, in bread and in wine: in the Gospel rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered. We receive His Name and His Spirit in our Baptism; His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. And if we have the Name of Jesus, the Spirit of Jesus, the Body and the Blood of Jesus—what then does that make us? Whom does that make us? Christ comes to us today in the Church, the assembly (ekklesia) of believers, if only we are watchful enough to discern Him there.

And of course we await the great Parousia of Christ in His Second Coming, the end—which is to say, the fulfilment—of the world and all the cosmos. As St Paul put it in his Epistle to the Corinthians: “Then comes the end, when He hands over the Kingdom to God the Father … for He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet [and] the last enemy to be destroyed is death … so that God may be all in all.”

The end of all things, also known as the Apokatastasis or “Restoration,” has always been a source of lucrative speculation, despite Jesus Himself telling us that we can know neither the day nor the hour. For some, the destruction of Jerusalem signified the end of the old world. For the Gospel of John, it was the Crucifixion, the moment of judgment and mercy from the Cross, revealed at last as the axis upon which all of history turns.

Eventually the world will end, be it tomorrow or unfathomable aeons from now. When or how is not really the point. All we need know is that Christ is with us, and that no matter how bad things seem in our own day, it isn’t the end of the world. Such is the point of all apocalyptic literature: that there is an end, a good one, and this isn’t it.

Keep awake. Keep alert. Be watchful. Look for all the ways in which Christ comes to us today, and by which He is present even now: through the Church, yes, but also through our neighbor in his need; by the beauties of Creation; and deep within the still and sacred silence at the center of our souls. God is always there, in holiness and patience.

Our world has enough to worry about, enough to rush out and buy. What it needs is hope, and peace, and quiet expectation. In short, we need an Advent.

In Jesus. Amen.