The First Coming

Because she died before Pop married, my siblings and I never knew our paternal grandmother. She was something of a giant in our eyes, maybe because our acquaintance with her was limited to family lore. Born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century into a family which prized education and culture she was at home with the literary and musical arts and became a concert pianist before starting a family of her own. When she was a young girl her convent training reinforced her penchant for independent thinking, a trait she exemplified convincingly her whole life. Aware of this latter point, once when I was still negotiating those adolescent seas of skepticism, I asked Pop if his mother had believed in life after death. His reply remains unforgettable.

 “Yes”, he said, “she anticipated it with school-girl enthusiasm”.

Enthusiasm. How easily it can wane in a world so apparently troubled as our own. Nevertheless, today is the first Sunday of Advent. If not by the plethora of Yuletide advertising assuring us “’tis the season to be jolly”, then by the liturgical calendar we are reminded that “‘tis the season to be joyful”. Christians around the world begin to focus their attention on the nativity of the Savior who came to redeem us and set things straight between us and our Creator. What serious believer does not experience a rush of enthusiasm upon contemplating the beauty and majesty of the Bethlehem infancy narrative?

It’s human nature to be moved by the wonder of Christmas, the celebration of our Lord’s first appearance among us. The exchanged wishes for peace and love are genuine and stir us with a sort of spiritual power. For the most part their sincerity is not vitiated by the economic power of crass consumerism. Advent, though, lasts for only four weeks and Christmastide ends twelve days later. In the balance of the liturgical year no other time enkindles in us the emotion of such hope, a hope which inevitable recedes in the months that follow.

Hope, however, should not dwindle. Christian belief, rooted in the Nicene Creed, professes that the Child born in the manger is the Son of God and “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end” and that believers “look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. Christmas, then, is not the culmination of the joy engendered by the Incarnation; rather it is the introduction to the mysterious ‘already/not yet’ arrival of the Kingdom.

In the face of today’s relentlessly cynical press many of us understandably experience a sense of hopelessness. One way of reviving and sustaining hope is to contemplate the one miracle of Jesus recorded in all four Gospels (yes, there is only one). In the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes Jesus divides the handful of bread and fish and miraculously feeds the thousands who have accompanied him. The miracle is referred to not as the ‘division’ of the loaves and fishes, but rather as the ’multiplication’ of the loaves and fishes. Love does not divide; it multiplies. Those who grow up with brothers or sisters understand this. Our calling as Christians is to accept that everyone is our brother or sister. Philanthropy manifests this. The more we do the greater our hope will be.

Dark does not extinguish light. Light illumines the dark. The shadows in our world mustn’t dim our hope. While skepticism is healthy, cynicism is harmful. Jesus says we should be childlike. We should anticipate the Second Coming with school-girl enthusiasm and remember that it is the Second Coming that gives meaning to the First.