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Joe Heschmeyer explores the many meanings of anticipating Christ’s coming during the season of Advent.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Last week I mentioned that Advent has this twofold character. It’s both about Christ first coming, his first advent at Christmas. It’s also about his final advent at the end of time, but the reality is there’s kind of a threefold character to advent that is both about Christ first coming, his last coming, but also the middle coming of Christ. Now, I’m not just making this up and don’t worry, there’s not going to be a forthcoming of Christ next week that I bring up. No, I’m building off of something that St. Bernard of Clave points out that’s rooted very much in scripture. Now, if you’re not familiar with Bernard, he’s the founder of the Sterian Order. He’s an Abbott from the early 12th century and was massively influential in the time period in which he lived, and he has this beautiful sermon on Advent that’s quoted in the Office of Readings, in the liturgy of the hours, and he says, we know that there are three comings of the Lord.
The third lies between the other two. It is invisible while the other two are visible. Okay, so what is he talking about here? Well, he says, okay, the first coming is when Christ was seen on earth dwelling among men. He himself testifies that they saw him and hated him. In the final coming, all flesh will see the salvation of our God and they will look on him whom they’ve pierced. So that’s easy enough. The first coming, of course, is at Christmas. The final coming is when Christ returns in glory to judge living in the dead. But what’s this middle coming that he’s talking about as he puts it, he says, the intermediate coming is a hidden one in it. Only the elects see the Lord within their own selves and they’re saved. That is the whole world could see Jesus in his verse coming. The whole world will see Jesus in his final coming, but this middle coming, this kind of third advent as it were, is an interior recognition of the presence of God within your own heart.
He recaps by saying, in his first coming, our Lord came in our flesh and in our weakness in this middle coming, he comes in spirit and in power, in the final coming, he’ll be seen in glory and majesty. Now you might say, okay, but why use the language of advent or the coming of Christ? Because we have a pretty firmly established language that the second coming refers to Christ’s final coming and glory. And I don’t want to upset that. I don’t think Bernard would want to upset that, but rather it is worth realizing that the way he’s talking about this is thoroughly biblical. I mean, he points to John chapter 14 where Jesus says in verse 23, if a man loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him.
That’s really big that there is a coming of Christ right now here and now within you. And if we lose sight of that, then we can imagine our relationship with Christianity is one of an external kind of connection that I believe in Jesus over there. I believe in Jesus in heaven. I have this relation to the church out there, but no, if you understand this correctly, this is something that is interior. It’s not just that you are on your way to God, true. It’s not just that you’re a member of something bigger and broader than you externally true. It’s also not to the exclusion of those. It’s also that God wants to come to you here and now and promises to do so if you love him and keep his commands. So then Bernard says, well, where is he going to come? Well, clearly your heart.
And he quotes Psalm 119 which says, I have laid up thy word in my heart that I might not sin against. See that if we love him and keep his word, well, where is that happening that’s in your heart. Now, heart in this sense doesn’t mean literally like the physical organ, as the catechism points out in the biblical usage of heart. It’s the place to which we withdraw the hidden center of our lives beyond the grasp of reason, beyond the grasp of others, that part of you that no one else can see directly, and it’s this place where only God can see you. And in fact, only God knows your heart at the deepest level because even you don’t, there’s times where you do something where you say, why did I do that? That’s where God wants to meet you. That’s this place of divine encounter right now.
Now, I want to tie these three comings together, the coming of Christ at Christmas, the coming of Christ in your heart right now and the coming of Christ at the end of the world. But before I get there, I want to add one more kind of piece to the puzzle. This is from the Great Jesuit priest and martyr, father Alfred Delp. Now, if you’re not familiar with Delp, he has a beautiful book called Advent of the Heart, seasonal Sermons in Prison Writings 1941 to 1944. As you might guess from that title, DELP was a German Catholic priest who was martyred by the Nazis because he stood up against the horrors of Nazi Germany. Now in 1943, about a year before he’s arrested and then eventually executed, he’s preaching on the first Sunday of Advent, and the passage in question that he focuses on is from Luke 21.
In verses 25 and 26, Jesus says, talking about of course, the final tribulation, there will be signs and sun and moon and stars and upon the earth the stress of nations and perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves. And then he says, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming in the world for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Now imagine how that strikes in the middle of World War ii, as you’re living in Germany and you’re seeing all sorts of horrors unleashed and it looks extremely bleak and you don’t know if the sun will come out again in your lifetime. And Del talks about this. He doesn’t explicitly say what he’s talking about, but it’s very clear what the subtext is. He says, there is a character of fearful expectation when things start to tremble, when life is felt to be so menacing, something has gone horribly awry and the world seems very scary right now, and there are times and places whether in your life or in world events or whatever where that might relate.
But he says, nevertheless, it is bourgeois simply to wait for the sky to become light again. That you don’t just, okay, well, you’re not just waiting for the bad stuff to be over. Oh, it’ll be over someday. That’s not really enough. Rather, he says, we don’t understand the point of waiting. If we forget that the deeper meaning of life is to keep watch. So it’s easy to just say, I don’t like the way the culture’s looking. I don’t like the way the world’s looking right now, but if we just stop there, we’ve missed it. Rather we should recognize this points to something deeper. What is that deeper thing? Well, he says, here’s what lies behind it. Man must notice and feel that the longing for son and for happiness is only the foreground, that it is his affliction to hunger for something more. I love that expression.
You are pained by this hungering for something more. Man is not really human until the good is actualized before him, and love is activated within him. In other words, he says, there is no earthly event power or love that can bring peace to man’s heart. Now, just stop there because when things are going awry the world, it can be like, okay, that’s the problem that needs to be fixed. Do something about this Nazi Germany problem or whatever the problem is in your life, whether it’s something in your immediate life, whether it’s cultural, whether it’s global, whatever it is, we can say, okay, that thing needs to stop. And maybe so maybe that thing does need to stop. Delp clearly was of the view that the Nazis had to go, but he’s aware that that’s not going to suddenly create the kind of peace we’re longing for.
That might be one of the things disrupting us. That might be one of the things causing distress might be one of the things we’re waiting for it to be done with, but that’s not going to be the solution. He says, rather, there are promises about mankind above and beyond all your wishes and ideas. What counts is that the Lord has consecrated and created you for an intimacy with God that no human eye has seen, no human ear has hurt. We are designed for this. In other words, God’s made you for relationship with him, and so nothing else is going to satisfy that. And so whether things are going really badly in your life or whether things are going really well in your life, we are still marked by this waiting because we don’t have the one thing we want in its fullness. This isn’t an obvious way of things are going really badly, but if things are going really well, if you say, do I have everything?
Am I totally content? Is this heaven? No. If you have any sense of interior self-awareness, you’ll say There’s something more I’m longing for. And that can of course become really bad when it leads to things like possessiveness and greed and all of this desire for excess. Or we can realize, oh, this infinite longing I have is properly oriented towards God, and nothing besides God is going to satisfy me. And so I’m in this place of waiting. So then Del points out like waiting is both a blessing but also really kind of a curse. He says, there’s nothing more blessed in life than true waiting, but there’s also no greater blessedness than having to wait for each plan is thwarted and left in fragments. I mean, think about DELP’s own life. He’s part of this nonviolent resistance movement standing up to the Nazis. And as far as he knows, by the end of his life, they’ve lost.
Now the reality is they were so close to the end of the war. They were so close to seeing all of their plans come to fruition, but they didn’t live to see it happen. By the end of their earthly life, it looked like the bad guys won. And that may be the story of your life. It may be sorry to be the bearer of bad news that none of the plans you have for your life go the way you want them to go, not just right now, maybe never, and you might get to the end of your life and feel like nothing worked. Everything was a failure. That’s the kind of blessed feeling waiting that we have to be prepared for. But then Delp is going to say, okay, what do we do with that? He says, this should be our first advent light to understand everything all that happens to us and all that threatens us from the perspective of life’s character of waiting.
Remember, we’re talking here about this third advent or the middle advent Christ coming to us in our hearts and it’s fitting that Del’s book is called The Advent of the Heart because this is where Christ wants to meet us now, not just later. So we should understand everything all that happens to us and all that threatens us from the perspective of life’s character of waiting. We must endure all the blessedness and blessedness of waiting because we are underway. The character of life is to keep going, to keep a lookout and to endure and tell the vigilant heart of man and the heart of God who meets us come together that we want this heart to heart encounter with God, me in the depths of who I am encountering God in the depths of who He is. And he says, we do this in a couple of ways right now.
We do it in the true interior meeting, in the sacraments and later in the final homecoming. So that middle advent where we come to meet Christ in His word, in the sacraments, all these ways, that is a real encounter. Now, that’s also a preparation for an even deeper encounter At the final homecoming, God enters only his own rooms where someone is always keeping watch for him. I love that line. We talk about making room in the end at Advent, but that’s what we’re talking about here, that it’s not just something for advent that if you want to encounter Christ, you need to make space for him. So now I want to turn back to St. Bernard because I think this dovetails very nicely with how he thinks of this middle advent. He says, because coming lies between the other two, it’s like a road on which we travel from the first coming Christmas to the last, the final judgment in the first Christ was our redemption. In the last you’ll appear as our life in this middle coming, he is our rest in consolation, right? The waiting would be unbearable if we didn’t have the fact that we already possess Christ to some measure that we already have what it is we’re hoping for. If we were without Christ simply awaiting him, this would prove unbearable given all the two months of life. And so Christ comes to us here and now to strengthen us on this journey where we can spend eternity with him.
And so Bernard says, if you keep the word of God in this way, it also will keep you. The Son with the Father will come to you. The great prophet who will build the new Jerusalem will come the one who makes all things new. And I mentioned before, the church speaks of this twofold character of admin, but it’s not blind to this middle coming both. It’s like I said, it’s in the office of readings and the liturgy of the hour. So the church encourages, even requires priests and religious to pray on these texts and encourages the laity to pray on these things during advent time. But also the director and popular piety in the liturgy points out that advent is his time of waiting, conversion and hope. And more specifically, joyful hope that the salvation already accomplished by Christ and the reality of grace in the world will mature and reach their fullness.
So notice it’s saying we’re not waiting, having nothing. We’re waiting having something and watching it grow, watching it mature and reach its fullness until we can someday meet Christ face to face and see him as he is because we’ll be like him. So again, it’s not like you’ve got zero in your waiting for a hundred. It is rather like Christ has begun to grow in you and is growing to maturity. And so the image in Advent that we naturally turn to is out of the Virgin Mary. She’s kind of the exemplar of advent. There’s this beautiful Italian tradition. I don’t know if it’s elsewhere, but like 15th century Italian paintings of the enunciation almost always show Mary reading the Bible that it’s showing she is contemplating the word. She is open to the small W word of God and has received it within her heart.
And this is the preparation with which she receives the large W word of God, Jesus Christ in her heart and in her body, that there’s the coming of Christ first at the level of the heart and then at the bodily level, the coming of Christ interiorly, and then what eventually turns out to be the face-to-face encounter at Christmas. Well, likewise, we want to prepare by receiving Christ here and now in His word and in the sacraments so that we’re prepared for our face-to-face encounter with him either at our death or at the last judgment. Father de puts it like this. He says, Mary is the most comforting figure of advent. The angel’s message found her heart ready and the word became flesh. And in the holy room of her motherly heart, the earth grew far beyond its limitations into the human divine sphere. These are the holiest comforts of Advent. So let’s try this advent to be a little bit more like Mary, to receive Jesus in scripture and the sacraments and all the ways he comes to us so that we can be more prepared to encounter him when we go to him at our death or when he comes to us at the end of time. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.