Advent: The Beginning of the Church Year
The following article with the above title, written for the Tonawanda Herald by the Episcopalian Clergyman, contains, aside from its ecclesiastical superstition of “days and months and times and years,” some thoughts so valuable that I send them for publication in the Review. S. B. WHITNEY. Next Sunday is the first in Advent. This season, which embraces about four weeks, is the beginning of the church year. It commences with the Sunday nearest St. Andrew’s day, whether before or after, and lasts until Christmas—with which it is sometimes improperly confounded. Christmas commemorates simply the birth of our Lord. It is the festival of the incarnation, the fulfillment of the prophecy: “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Advent has a more general import. It does not refer specifically to the taking on of human nature by the Son of God. Including this as an important preliminary step, and embracing all the earlier life of Christ, it culminates in the opening of his public career, the beginning of his three years’ ministry. Its characteristic event and central thought, the account of which constitutes the gospel for the first Sunday, is his entrance into the capital of the Jewish theocracy, and his appearing in the temple to drive thence those who carried on traffic within its sacred precincts. This was his first official act, his first assumption of Messianic authority. Jesus thereby claimed to be the Saviour foretold by the prophets, the Lord of the sanctuary, who, in the words of Malachi, was “suddenly to appear in his temple.” This act was designed to give the heads of the Jewish nation an opportunity of receiving and owning him as their Messiah—an opportunity which was wholly misimproved. At the close of his ministry, and only a few days before his death, our Lord repeated this act with still greater emphasis and sternness, for the same object as at first, and with the same result. Then, emphatically, were the words fulfilled: “He came to his own and his own received him not.” This, and not his birth into the world, is properly Christ’s first advent. But this season differs from Christmas also in that its import is twofold. It not only looks back, but also forward. While it calls to mind Christ’s coming “to visit us in great humility,” it also anticipates his “coming again in the last day in his glorious majesty, to judge both the quick and the dead.” These two comings of Christ, which the church has wisely placed side by side as branches of the same subject, lend each other significance and force by contrast. They constitute one of those blendings of apparent opposites which occur so frequently, alike in the character, in the acts, and the events in the life of Him who was at once David’s Son and David’s Lord, the “Lamb that was slain,” and the “Lion of the tribe of Judah,” the gentlest and the boldest of men, he who, poor and homeless, could feed the multitude, who endured persecution and revilings though legions of mighty angels stood ready to fly to his defense, and who submitted to death although the Lord of life, whose omnific word had recalled others from the grave. There is a beauty and an advantage in this joint contemplation of opposite truths. They limit and qualify each other, and we are kept from the extremes to which the exclusive consideration of either would tend. To think of Christ only as the compassionate Saviour, as the sympathizing Son of man, “the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief,” might lead to irreverence and presumption. To view him only as the almighty and omniscient One, to whose searching glance our thoughts and deeds are all open and at whose judgment seat we are all to be summoned, might drive us to despair. But blending these characters, uniting these offices, as the church calls upon us to do in Advent, we are furnished with incentives to self-examination, with encouragements to prayer, with motives to obedience, with grounds of love and fear, and we are prepared to adopt as our motto the beautiful exhortation in the epistle for the day: “The night is far spent, the day is at hand; let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armor of light. Let us walk honestly as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfill the lusts thereof.”