Christmas and the Apocalypse
Waiting for a Hidden God during Advent
BY AMY CROUCH
This Sunday, Christians worldwide began to prepare for Christmas—but not by putting on Mariah Carey or shopping for presents. Instead, in many traditions, this Sunday marked the beginning of the liturgical season of Advent: a season of prayer, fasting, and repentance for the coming of the Lord. Advent’s sobriety contrasts with the exuberant celebration of Christmastide; the somber music and art associated with it emphasizes the darkness of the world into which Christ was born. But Advent isn’t merely a time of preparation for Christmas. It also looks to the apocalypse.
Since the early centuries of the church, Christians have connected the Scriptural dots between remembering Jesus’ first coming in humility—his birth at Christmas—and awaiting his second coming in glory. The catechist Cyril of Jerusalem taught in the 300s: “One [descent], the unobserved, like rain on a fleece; and a second His open coming, which is to be. In His former advent, He was wrapped in swaddling clothes in the manger; in His second, He covers Himself with light as with a garment.” [1] For Cyril, and for generations of Christians since, the cozy Christmas season is necessarily linked to Jesus’s apocalyptic return.
This juxtaposition is alarming to twenty-first century hearers, especially since the word “apocalypse” might make us more likely to think of zombies than Jesus. Two thousand years have put a lot of baggage on the word apocalypse. But at the root, its meaning is simple: Apocalypse comes from a verb meaning “to uncover.” An apocalypse is a revelation — and in the last book of the Bible, the familiar word “Revelation” is a simple translation of the word apocalypse.
During Advent, we are hoping for a big reveal.
But if we’re awaiting an uncovering, we should rightly ask: What’s being hidden right now? And why?
Instinctively, we know that concealment can bring us overflowing joy. As children, we rejoice in hide and seek and peek-a-boo; as adults, we throw surprise parties and we hide the bridegroom from the bride before the wedding.
And for the very nature of some things, hiding is necessary. As Jesus tells his disciples, “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” [2] As I write, any gardener wishing to have flowers bloom in the spring had better have planted them a month ago. The bulbs of narcissus and amaryllis must be hidden safely in the dark of the earth—where we see only frosty ground, hard as iron—to leap forth in April. Jesus, like every one of us, was hidden in the womb for nine months. The mess and joy of birth is preceded by quiet waiting in the dark.
Yet there is a deeper and more terrifying mystery at the heart of Advent. What are we to do when God hides himself?
It is an agonizing question, asked over and over in Scripture. “O Lord,” cries out the suffering Psalmist, “why do you hide your face from me? Afflicted and close to death from my youth up, I suffer your terrors; I am helpless.” [3]
Every day, people join the Psalmist in asking God why he has hidden himself. Why has he not come to our aid? Why has he allowed the widow and orphan to be trampled and allowed the small child to starve?
Even worse, why does it sometimes seem as though God himself has brought devastation? Voices in Scripture assign their suffering not to random chance, but to the Lord: “He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones; he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation; he has made me sit in darkness like the dead of long ago” cries the unknown poet of Israel’s exile. [4]
The theologian Fleming Rutledge writes, drawing on Martin Luther’s writings, of “two hands: his right hand of creating and redeeming is sometimes hidden in his left hand of judging and destroying.” [5] We long for God to work his “proper” work—but we find ourselves faced, too, with what seems to be God’s absence, or even more fearfully, his doing what seems to us to be ‘alien’ work. [6]
It is this hiddenness that we confront during Advent. Can we trust the God who hides himself? As much as the scenes described in the book of Revelation might frighten us, we all long for a true apocalypse: a time when what is lost, mysterious, and buried will be found and explained and resurrected.
If Advent were only a season of sitting and wondering, it would have little to teach us. Uniquely, however, Advent relies on faith. We celebrate Advent because a revelation is coming.
But if we didn’t know the story, Christmas is not quite the apocalypse we’d expect. The prophet Malachi declares that “The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple ... But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi.” [7]
The terrifying descent of the Lord, like fire and like corrosive lye, sounds like the book of Revelation. It does not especially sound like Christmas.
In the Incarnation, God becomes a tiny baby in a tiny town from a tiny tribe. He is covered in flesh. He is born with celebration in heaven but little fanfare on earth.
Yet this Incarnation—as un-apocalyptic as it may seem—is a blinding revelation. Our invisible God, captured by no picture or statue, becomes a living image walking on the earth, teaching and healing and dying and rising again. At Christmas we find the God at whom all we fling all of our questions suddenly among us and ready to do the work we long for him to do. As Rutledge writes, “In spite of all appearances to the contrary, in spite of the apparent darkness, God in Christ is shaping our history in accordance with his divine purposes.” [8]
During Advent, we face the hiddenness of God, his alien work whose purpose makes no sense to us. But we also expect an unveiling. As we prepare for Christmas, we look for both the birth of the tiny child, and the return of the mighty King. Incarnation and apocalypse.
SOURCES
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Orations, Lecture 15, tr. Gifford.
John 12:24 ESV
Psalm 88:14-15 ESV
Lamentations 3:4-6 NRSV
Fleming Rutledge, God Spoke to Abraham. Eerdmans, 2011.
Isaiah 28:10
Malachi 3:1-3 NRSV
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/december-web-only/advent-apocalypse-fleming-rutledge-essential-to-this-season.html