Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy 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 quick and the dead; we may rise to the life immortal.
This prayer, used in the Ordinariate form (Divine Worship) of the Mass, is remarkable, and quite different from what most Catholics hear today.
In the extraordinary form, this Sunday has a collect which may be familiar to some of us in English: “Stir up thy power, O Lord, and with great might come among us.” It’s a Latin prayer, of course, but in English translation it was used in the prayer book tradition, and in our missal, on the fourth Sunday of Advent—not to be confused with a different “stir up” prayer, which was used on the final Sunday before Advent. That one became associated not just with the necessary stirring up of those ingredients for the Christmas pudding—which, if you live in cold, damp England, are sitting under the bed in the spare room for most of the month.
Today, I want to point out the clarity with which our prayer highlights the meaning of Advent. It does so in two ways.
First, it reminds us that Advent is a time of penitence. This is a time to “cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light.” This is a particularly good reminder for us Americans who have exited the fleshly excesses of Thanksgiving only to enter the consumer extravaganza that is Black Friday and Christmas shopping. Advent is not, emphatically, a time to be artificially cheerful for the sake of a Christmas season that will not actually arrive for another four weeks. This isn’t to say that we are supposed to be gloomy in Advent, any more than we are supposed to be gloomy in Lent. But whereas much of the world is content to skip over Advent to make an endless season of feasting, Holy Church invites us to the countercultural witness of acknowledging that Jesus is coming but that he is not yet here, both in terms of Christmas and in terms of the end of the world. Like the birth of a baby in a normal family, the final month of preparation is joyful but also serious: things are getting real, and the preparations aren’t just fun and games, but serious work. When the baby comes, we need to be ready for more than a dinner party.
Second, the prayer reminds us that the first Advent is intrinsically related to the second. The purpose of Advent is not merely to commemorate the nativity; it is to prepare ourselves for the final and definitive Advent of Christ in the world—the Advent spoken of in the Gospels, when the Son of Man will come in glory to judge the world. We prepare for this Advent, lest it “come upon [us] suddenly like a snare,” as Luke says.
How then, should we prepare to avoid being taken suddenly and unawares? I think Scripture and tradition give us two definite ways to prepare.
The first is in a way the most direct, for it is a third form of Christ’s Advent. He comes to us daily on all the altars of the Catholic Church under the external form of bread and wine. This is the way that he himself instituted his ongoing presence among and for us. And so the first way to prepare ourselves for the coming of Christ in the last day is to learn to meet him in the way that he already comes to us day after day in the Eucharist. We should spend time with him in adoration; we should receive Holy Communion with a right intention and in a state of grace. Christ ordained to be known to us in this form precisely because it is both present to our senses and beyond our senses. Our senses are trained, in other words, both to acknowledge what is present and to recognize a presence beyond what is visible.
The second is less direct, but no less real: Christ is present in his members, the Church. Think about why the lectionary gives us this reading from 1 Thessalonians alongside the others. St. Paul speaks about growing in love for the brethren; he speaks of treating one another with love so that we will be blameless when Christ comes again. In other words, how can we expect to meet Christ with joy when he comes to judge when we cannot be bothered to see him in the brothers and sisters who stand next to us in his Church?
In a way, it is harder to see Jesus in our fellow Christians than it is to see him in the monstrance. In the Eucharist, he doesn’t speak back: he is passive, silent, waiting to be known and loved. But in our brethren, he is veiled under human personality, physical variety, and social connection.
All of this is to say that the hospitality and interaction of the coming season is not irrelevant to the more sober purposes of Advent. No, Advent is not Christmas. But if we want to get Christmas when it comes, we have to, in a sense, find Christmas here and now—in the Eucharist, and in God’s people. Like at Christmas, our Lord comes to us in great humility. May we learn to see him wherever he is.