I’ve been celebrating Advent for over 40 years as a pastor and learned something new about it this year. As surprised as I was to realize I had not known about this other aspect of the emphasis, it makes perfect sense.

The title of a new book being advertised earlier in the fall got my attention: ADVENT: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ. Written by Fleming Rutledge, I was curious about a book dealing with both Jesus’ birth (his first coming) and Jesus’ future coming (what is called his second coming). I ordered the book in the middle of November and have been working my way through it.

What was new to me is that Advent is a season of focusing on both Jesus’s birth and his future coming. Rutledge affirms “Advent is preeminently the season of the second coming” (p. 52). She notes that during advent “The movement is from the second coming to the first coming.” (p. 60). I had never heard that before. She notes in the first part of Advent Christians are focusing on and looking forward to Jesus’ second coming. The second part of Advent is the celebration of his first coming so many years ago.

In my experience (and in most churches) Advent begins the fourth Sunday before Christmas. But Fletcher notes “the Advent season actually begins before the first Sunday of Advent. It’s a seven week season” (p. 172). Later she reports “The season was not intended to be the run-up to Christmas in the sense that we think of today. It was designed to be the season that looked forward, not to the birth of the baby Jesus in Bethlehem, but to the second coming of Christ” (p. 180). That part of the advent theme is that “He (Jesus) will come again to set all things right” (p. 177).

Soon after I started reading Rutledge’s book I read an online article from Christianity Today that reinforced what I had been reading. Courtney Ellis blends the focus of both comings by noting that Advent is about “the sacred hope that Christ has come and will come again.”

A third source I just began reading on Monday is N.T. Wright’s Advent for Everyone. The first sentence in the introduction to this daily devotional asserts “If people know anything about Advent, they know it’s the time when we prepare for Christmas.” I think he’s right (no play on his name intended!) and that is what I have always thought. On the next page he writes about the new aspect of Advent I have just learned about: “. . . that brings us to the other side of Advent: because this season isn’t just about getting ready for Jesus to be born. It’s about getting ready for Jesus to come back” (p. xii).

I have no idea if the practice of focusing on both Jesus’ first coming as well as his future coming during Advent is new to you like it is to me, but I like it. I’m not lobbying to extend Advent to seven weeks as I think four is adequate, but I agree with the observation Courtney Ellis makes when she asks, “Why not overlap the two—the celebration and anticipation—and commemorate the birth of Christ while waiting his return?”

While some Christians seem to focus too much on the second coming, a lot of us may not give it enough attention. This year in my own celebration I’m reminding myself that Jesus did indeed come as God promised, and that he will come again.

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