Christmas and Beyond

In the beginning, there was no Christmas. At least, there was no celebration of the birth of Christ on 25th December each year. The church did not begin celebrating Christmas as a festival until the fourth century.

The key festival for the church before the fourth century was rather Epiphany, on 6th January. This was the time to remember a range of events associated with the birth and childhood of Christ, leading up to his baptism. Epiphany was a time when Christians would be baptized and welcomed into the church. The forty days leading up to the celebration of Epiphany, like the forty days of Lent leading up to Easter, were marked out as a time for fasting, prayer, confession and meditation.

After the decision to mark out December 25th as the feast day of Christmas, this period leading up to Epiphany naturally began to focus more on preparation for the celebration of Christ’s birth at Christmas. It also developed a dual focus, remembering not only Christ’s first coming at Bethlehem, but anticipating his second coming too. Indeed, it was the anticipation of the second coming which gave the season its name ‘advent’, from the Latin adventus, meaning ‘coming’ or ‘appearance’.

We might sometimes feel that the build-up to Christmas is long, busy and exhausting, and that the brief twenty-four hours of Christmas Day itself are thus somewhat anti-climatic. As we move through Advent, though, let’s remember that the season is more than a countdown to a one-day only event. It is a chance to look backwards to remember that the promises that God made in the Old Testament were fulfilled when Jesus was born, lived, died, rose in the first century. And it is a chance to look forward to the future when, because we know God fulfilled his promises of sending Christ, we can also be confident that God will also bring about the justice and renewal of which all scripture speaks and for which this world longs.

Advent recognises that we live in a state of tension: that our celebration of Christmas can never be enough while the child of Bethlehem has not yet returned to bring healing and restoration to the world into which he was born. The cry of advent, ‘Come, Lord Jesus’, recognises that all is still not as it should be, and asks – even demands - that Christ rescue us all from our sin, disease and darkness.

This twelfth-century carol, translated into English in the nineteenth century, captures this sense of longing well, using the image of ‘captive Israel’ to refer not only to the people for whom Christ came as Messiah in the first century, but as a metaphor for all of us who dwell in ‘lonely exile’ until the return of Christ to the earth.

O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Day-Spring, come and cheer
Our spirits by Thine advent here
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night
And death's dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.