Let's End at the Beginning

In our ordinary conversation, when someone wants to tell us a story, we ask them to start at the beginning. Our Advent conversation, in one sense, begins at the ending and ends at the beginning.

Our Advent Liturgies are in one sense prayerful and celebrational conversations with the Lord, with our selves, and with one another. We tell about our lives, our faith, and our hopes with colors, with words, with music, and with ritualized symbols. As we come to the end of one liturgical year with the Solemnity of Christ the King, and we begin another cycle of worship, the ending and the beginning is the same.

The readings for the last two Sundays of the Liturgical Year are prophetic, pointing to the final days of the world’s history with an apocalyptic emphasis on judgement and being ready for these final times. Something revelatory will happen. God will show himself to us. We will be transformed into something other. The invitation is to be alert to what is happening and allow ourselves to be taken up into the final actions, which bring us to God’s Kingdom.

Advent is multi-dimensional in its themes. The first two Sundays continue the invitation to something about to happen in our world. God is still acting and his action involves us. The language of the readings is cosmic in scope. The prophetic readings soften the judgmental language with the more poetic language of God’s fidelity and create a new world. There is something of a restoration of a relationship somehow lost.

Once Upon a Time
The final two Advent Sundays have a certain “once upon a time” sound to them. But, most importantly, its not make-believe. The stories of Jesus’ coming and the preparation for it to happen are in history. More accurately, we read “in those days... it came to pass”. The story telling ends with the beginning. Christ is the end of the story and the beginning of a new story of God’s covenant of love with his people.

Christ the King tells us the completion of the story and the purpose of why the

Father entered into loving relationship with his People. We are gathered for and in Christ. The unfolding of that story of all things reconciled in the Christ begins with the telling of the Christmas story of the birth of the Messiah.

Infancy Narratives
The final Advent Sundays begin the telling of the familiar Infancy Narrative, how the birth of Jesus came to be and the events surrounding the Word of God made flesh in the person of Jesus. From the beginning, Jesus is born to gather all people as one before the Father. We are reconciled and restored to our relationship with the Father by the saving death and rising of the Lord.

One needs to read carefully the seemingly romantic Infancy Narratives. Under the “at that time...”, there is the encounter of God with man in human history. The birth of the savior is miraculous surrounded by the “glory” or presence of God. The birth fulfills the faithful covenant of God with his People. The earth is transformed by the birth and the nations are invited to the joy and the good news of the event. The story needs to be told. The story to the poor and needy in the person of the shepherds is brought by the very messengers of God in the angels. The good news is preached to the ends of the earth in the story of the wise men who followed the star, the light of God’s transforming presence.

A Personal and Communal Story
The Advent and Christmas story is at once intimately personal and wildly embracing of the whole community. The story is told so that all people come to know Christ in his story. In him, all of us encounter the loving kindness of the Father. In him, we are reconciled and made one.

The scriptures and the carols that reflect on the Word of God remind us that “the heavens and the earth” are transformed by the birth of Christ. The fulness of this transformation in grace is that death and life are made one in Christ. Sin is forgiven and humankind again has hope.

The beginning and the end or the end and the beginning of the story is Christ. He is at the center of our Advent hope and our Christmas joy.

CDH