You see? Mystery of all mysteries: the Sublime has become a baby, and not just a baby, but this baby with all of the particulars that make him beautiful: cheeks, eyes, coloration, toes, knots of hair, DNA, unique kinds of stink, etc.

Christianity, you see, is chock-full of foolery, one might even say we invented it: from the at least as early as the Flood, God has thrown the folly of our wisdom into boisterous relief against the wisdom of his (seeming) foolishness. For the flood was the one of the first moments in scripture where a pattern emerges that is neither tragic nor epic, but comedic: the strong with all of their seriousness (so miserably serious) try to drown-out the voice of God, but are themselves drowned-out. It is a kind of dark-comedy waaaay before dark comedy was a thing. One arrives at Genesis 9 shaking and a little overwhelmed, and yet filled with a kind of hopeful wonder: “Oh my, it worked… the Ark worked… I didn’t think it would, but it did… perhaps… perhaps this whole human-story thing might actually turn-out okay in the end afterall.”

[…] Christmas is pregnant with the Cross. That delightful red painted on all of our candy-canes, and ribboned bows, and wrapping paper, and ugly sweaters, and Santa hats, and holly berries, is of course blood red. And even around the manger we gather to sing “nails, thorns, shall pierce Him through, the Cross be born for me for you” […]

Advent is about the coming of the King.

Yes, that this King is fully God and fully man is properly part of the Advent proclamation. But we mustn’t exclude the fact of Christ’s Kingship from the gospel news.

Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know , Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th, it’s really just an ancient [INSERT CIVILIZATION] practice, it’s just the winter solstice, it’s gone too commercial, it’s become an idol in its own right, Christianity is not about the manger it’s about the Cross, etc.

[…] it is not without meaning that Jesus prays this prayer of desire in a garden, at night. For he is the true and greater Adam, in a Garden, in the cold of the (very early) morning […]

In particular, I want to consider “glory” as a thing that shapes the quality of Christian waiting. The Nicene Creed teaches us that Christ will not merely come again, but that “He will come again in glory…” And this word “glory” is more than an imaginative lacquer applied to the otherwise dull and rasping theology of the creeds. It is substantial.

For to hope is to suffer. Hoping means waiting. And for mortals waiting is a source of intense suffering. Jean Amery suggested that “space” and “time” were two key features of our passage through life. Waiting, hoping, is to forfeit both space and time. We don’t “move-on”. Rather we keep the vigil at the bedside of our longings. Standing still, remaining hopeful, is in some sense to suffer the loss of the potential opportunities and potentialities we could experience if we just gave up. “Curse God and die” is the suggestion of Job’s wife, which is to say “stop all this waiting —all this hoping— just end the story already, for I no longer have the stomach to watch it play-out any longer.” The pain of hope is embodied in the shards of pottery that Job uses to lance the boils that benight him as he sits in burlap and ashes.

Perhaps we might consider the ways in which, during Advent, its not so much that the branches are hung on the church, but rather that the church hangs on them —hangs our hopes, corporate and personal, on the promises of the Branch-King Jesus.

Under the yoke of bondage in Egypt the House of Israel groaned. And Yahweh heard them and set them free from the house of slavery. Out of their pain they raised a loud cry. Understand: they made their pain eloquent; they gave it voice.

But what, one might wonder, if Pharaoh had had at his disposal, the entertainment-media and pharmacological industries we boast of in the west? What would have become of the groaning of Israel in Egypt?