The First Advent: How a Carpenter Saw Christ But Herod Didn’t
A Christology of Advent and the Significance of Fasting
For nearly the entire 2000-year history of Christianity, disciples of Christ have always kept holy the season of Advent as a time of fasting and penance, a mini-Lent if you will, and deferred all Christmas festivities until the Eve of Our Lord’s birth. That is, until the modern commercialization of Christmas turned our sacred celebration of the Incarnation into a secular holiday. Decorations, lights, and presents have taken precedence over absorption into the divine life of Christ, and today’s Catholic culture suffers a divorce from its rootedness in the liturgy. Too often, however, do we get caught up in our lamentation over the absence of Christ in the mainstream that we fail to recognize the incredible gift before us and antidote to our ailing norms, while simultaneously enjoying the culture of the world more than we care to admit.
To better understand the forces at play, let us go back two millennia to the most riveting moment in history. At the heart of the survival for the liturgical presence of the Church in Western culture is a tale of two kings: Herod and Christ. One man the king of Judea, the other the King of Heaven and Earth. Before we enter into the drama of their rivalry, we must revisit the events which immediately preceded Our Lord’s birth.
The words of Mary as she said “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly” shook through the entire cosmos and struck fear into the heart of Herod, and thus the first Advent had begun. The long-awaited Messiah had arrived on the scene and was sought by all. “It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it” (Isa 2:2).
The first Advent was markedly different from what we have grown accustomed to seeing each winter. The halls were not decked with boughs of holly, and for Our Blessed Mother and St. Joseph it was anything but the most wonderful time of the year. The first Advent almost immediately drove the Holy Family to divorce after Mary conceived a child outside the confines of her betrothal to St. Joseph. “And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly” (Mt. 1:19). The Foster Father of Christ surely suspected infidelity, and Scripture does not indicate that Mary was able to successfully convince him otherwise. Only the divine intervention of God himself via an angel was able to open his heart to the truth.
As the 2005 film The Nativity Scene creatively explores in their telling of the first Advent, Mary and Joseph are subject to the shame and scorn of Nazareth and become outcasts in their hometown. How would they believe Mary’s story when it took an angel to win her husband’s trust? For His parents, their first days in the presence of Our Lord began in much the same way His life ended: alone and humiliated. The first Advent began not in glory, but in suffering, for only someone who has given up everything and suffered in this way is fit to be a tabernacle of the living God. “He came to his own home, and his own people received him not. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:11-12). It is only fitting that the parents Our Lord took on his human nature from should know Him in the Spirit first.
Alone and ostracized, our pregnant Blessed Mother embarked upon a 100-mile journey and 3100 foot ascent into Jerusalem to see her cousin Elizabeth. At some point thereafter, she and St. Joseph were summoned another 100 miles away to Bethlehem to participate in the Roman census at a time when her pregnancy was much further along. A poor carpenter who likely wondered how he would afford to raise his child was called away from work to set out on a dangerous trek across the Judean desert as his wife neared her labor. Along the way, it is reasonable to believe he nervously pondered how he might pay for lodging and food on his trip and make up for the lost wages while he was away from his job. His wife’s impending labor loomed over his heart as he mapped out places they might comfortably lodge if his Son came before they were back home. His heart had to also prepare to be the lone human to help Mary through labor if there were no midwife to assist. All these questions came up in prayer, no doubt. Giving Our Lord everything he had, he was met with one simple answer to each of these worries. God will provide.
On the night of her labor, Mary “gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7). The Holy Family’s first Advent culminated in the first Christmas, allowing them to become the first humans to gaze upon the face of God. The whole world was after this long-awaited King, including three magi from the East, and King Herod who “inquired of them where the Christ was to be born” (Mt 2:4). Even the Greek philosopher Plato accurately prophesied Our Lord’s crucifixion four centuries earlier and knew in the deepest trenches of his heart that sinful humanity needed a Savior.
Why then, when the whole of humanity hoped to meet this King, were these two outcasts from Nazareth (“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Jn 1:46) the first ones permitted to house the flesh of the living God and lay eyes upon Him? What separated Mary and Joseph from the rest of the world was their reception of the Lord as is. Though they all anticipated His arrival, the rest hoped to make the Messiah in their own image. God formed His Son in Mary’s womb in His image, and her perfect reception of the Word allowed Him to enter into our humanity unblemished and appear on earth as it is in heaven. Their level of trust in God and openness to all things outside their will expresses a faith unsurpassed by any other man. Even still, their fidelity is a sign beyond themselves and a share in Christ’s trust in the Father’s love and obedience to His divine will.
In his first moments on earth, Christ had nowhere to lay his head except a manger. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). Presumably, Our Lord willed this to reveal His Advent. The Gospels do not have record of Our Lord’s Advent since it took place beyond the scope of space and time. It was however divinely revealed to St. Paul in his letter to the Philippians, as he recollects the Heavenly dialogue between the Father and the Son. “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God, something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men” (Phi 2:6-7). The greatest act of humility which all other virtue is merely a shadow of, Our Lord exchanged the comforts of Heaven for the lowliness and finitude of a human body at the Father’s will.
Advent, then, finds its roots not in 1st Century Judea, but in the self-forgetfulness of Our Lord; an act of the Trinity never confined by time, but revealed in it. Think for a moment how difficult it is to give up your greatest attachment. For some, it might be their morning cup of coffee. For others, their television or their phone. Now picture Christ in the perfect repose before the Father, asked to give up this gaze to be with men. To paraphrase the Ven. Fulton J. Sheen, imagine if you were to forfeit your human nature to become a dog, and you had to spend the rest of your life thinking like a dog and talking like one.
Born a helpless child, He who has infinite knowledge of all things would have to trade this away to learn and grow just as any other man. His perfectly divine nature would by instinct know his Father, but since the Spirit speaks through aches and groans, Christ would need to know the language of the human body to decode. His biological limitations and developmental stages would make him, as St. Paul calls him, a slave to men. Our Lord would have to rely on the aid of his parents and mentors to reawaken the knowledge he forgot at birth so that by the age of thirty-three, he would have perfect memory of his descent and be fully prepared to return the human body to the Father in a new form.
Our Lord’s self-abandonment highlights two important points for us. First, it reveals why Mary and Joseph had to suffer dearly the first Advent. To bring Christ to the world was their share in the Cross. Mary conceived one Son but two natures on the day of the Annunciation. All this considered, it would be remiss to assume that Our Lady was spared of the physical pains of childbirth. Just as Our Lord volunteered his body for the salvation of man, it seems more fitting to believe her final act of Advent was to willingly embrace every sensation of labor for the love of her Lord, and, her love of sinful humanity. Why would the Mother of God not want to share in the most defining act of motherhood to be one with every other woman to birth a child, and more strikingly, to share the agony she knew her Son someday would on the Cross?
Paradoxically, then, while Lent is Christ’s suffering so men might be God, Advent is man’s suffering so God might become man. The second point enumerated by Our Lord’s self-abandonment then, and most importantly, is that without the sufferings of Advent, there is no resurrection and ascension into Heaven. Put simply, if Christ has no body, then there is nothing to return to the Father. This is why the Advent fast must return. Advent is not a recollection of a historical event, nor is it a preparation for a birthday celebration. Advent is Eucharistic in nature and the means by which our souls become pregnant with the Holy Spirit to give birth to Our Lord in the flesh. Advent ultimately points us towards our final end which is, namely, the fulfillment of time and communion between God and man. Advent opens our hearts to the eschaton and keeps us oriented towards the final coming of Christ, and open to his intermediate coming in the Spirit.
At the heart of Advent and Christmas is not an event, but a person, Jesus Christ, who has given himself to his Bride so we may receive him Sacramentally today. The Church’s wisdom, then, should not be ignored. When the vestments turn purple, that means the season is ripe for fasting and penance. “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up” (Ecc 3:1-3). There is a season for passionate Christmas celebrations, but the four weeks before Our Lord’s birth are not the time.
The Liturgy is not there for us as a suggestion. It is the concrete form for right worship to the Father and where we meet the Lord as is. The Liturgy is not made in our image, rather, the Lord seeks to recreate us in His through our reception of the Word in the Sacraments. As we leave the Mass, we are to become what we just received. During the Advent and Lenten liturgies then, the omission of the Gloria signals to the faithful what God is communicating to them; now is not the time to celebrate, but a time for fasting and penance. Make yourselves ready for my coming, is what Our Lord tells us. I am not here in the way my Father wills yet, but open your hearts and I will be soon. “As holy men and prophets waited for him, thinking that he would reveal himself in their own day, so today each of the faithful longs to welcome him in his own day, because Christ has not made plain the day of his coming” (Saint Ephrem).
When we begin our Christmas celebrations early in lieu of the Advent fast, we ought to be prudent to discern if it is Christ we are celebrating, or ourselves, when Our Lord has made clear what this time of year is meant for. As he fasted in the desert for 40 days, Satan came to Christ saying, “‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’ But he answered, ‘It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God’” (Mt 4:3-4). The time to feast is when the bridegroom is with us, but while we wait for his coming, our food is the Word of God.
The reason for this fast isn’t for self-improvement, but to become more other-oriented and self-forgetful, just as Our Lord when he became man. To fast is to participate in Mary and Joseph’s first Advent and feel their hunger, their pain, and share in the many sacrifices they made to give God a human form. Like Our Blessed Mother’s womb, we are invited to become tabernacles of the living God for the sake of sinful humanity, that they may meet Jesus Christ in the flesh. In the words of Bishop Robert Barron in his address to this year’s National Eucharistic Congress, “Our Christianity is not for us or designed to make us feel better about ourselves. Your Christianity is for the world… We eat the Body and drink the Blood of Jesus which you have been offered for the world.”
When we forsake the goods of the world to participate in the Advent fast, we accomplish precisely this and, like St. Joseph, might behold the Lord in our hands as a gift for all. This poor carpenter from Nazareth was able to see God with his own eyes only because he held firm to his Advent fast with Mary. Conversely, King Herod would never see the newborn King. Rather, he sought to snuff out the light of the world. He was so married to the pleasures of the world that he believed this “King of the Jews” he kept hearing about was after his crown. So drunk with power was Herod that he ordered the slaughter of all the male infants in Bethlehem.
Unlike his Nazarene counterpart, Herod was not willing to give up any of his attachments and fast for the arrival of the Messiah. Instead of being met by the loving gaze of the King of Judea, the Christ-child was chased by his sword. Herod was a man who checked off all the boxes on his faith and even restored the Second Temple of Jerusalem, a feat none of his contemporaries could claim. But when Our Lord came to visit Herod’s work, he said, “you make it a den of robbers” (Mt 21:13).
Herod’s temple was destroyed only seven decades later, in fulfillment of Our Lord’s prophecy, preluding for us the destruction inevitable to the human soul which is afraid to give up worldly goods. According to first century historian Flavius Josephus, Herod succumbed to a gruesome death sometime shortly after his slaughter of the innocents. Josephus recalls, “The disease of Herod grew more and more severe, God inflicting punishment upon him for his sins. For a fire glowed in him slowly, which burned him inwardly and did not so much appear to the touch outwardly. His bowels were also ulcerated, and an insatiable desire to eat seized him, which it was not possible to hinder. His entrails were so exulcerated that they bred worms, his feet were swollen with watery fluid, and his abdomen was inflamed in a most dreadful manner. He also suffered from shortness of breath, convulsions in all parts of his body, and the like” (Antiquities of the Jews 17, 6.5). Herod never fasted and had his fill in life, but at the moment of his death, he experienced a hunger which would never be satisfied.
Our modern culture today, which loathes fasting, seeks to snuff out the Liturgy of Advent in just the same way Herod sent out his men to kill Christ. The culture of consumerism and secular Christmas celebrations has lost its connection to Christ, and we need not let it inject its poison into our waters any longer. Mary and Joseph could have bowed to Herod and given up Our Lord in exchange for great wealth and royalties in the present, but would have died in hunger just the same. Instead, they received the Liturgy of Christ as is and let Him transform them. Let us stop trying to make Christ in our image and let him transform us into His.
Do you want to be hungry for a while now, or hungry later in death? As Our Lord once asked Peter, “Could you not watch with me one hour?” (Mt 26:40), he asks us today, “Could you not fast with me for four weeks?” Far greater gifts await us than the ones on our trees, if only we wait four short weeks and say yes. Our world needs you, and within the abode of your heart is the Spirit of Christ waiting to burst forth from your mouth, your lips, your nose, and your hands. All we need do is walk with Mary and Joseph for a while, so what is ours may become His. Then, our appetites will truly be filled and the celebration may commence. Let us give the world the gift of Christ this Christmas, and give to Christ the gift of our souls.