Forty-eight Advents after graduating from Seminary, traditional treatments of Advent themes strike me as trite. “Trite” comes from the Latin word tritus, the participle of terere, to rub. Media, consumerism, the compartmentalization of modern society, churchly routine, sentimentalism about baby Jesus… So much wears down the message of Christ’s advents, advents plural. Faithful people keep reminding us “Jesus is the reason for the season,” true enough, but Jesus makes countless advents, more than Bethlehem.
St. Peter wrote that the prophets “searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Peter 1:10-11). St. Paul about Israel in the wilderness: “All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ” (1 Corinthians 10:3-4). “Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary,” we today know God’s eternal Son as Jesus the Christ. The passages from Paul and Peter, and there are more, show that the One we call Jesus was active in the Old Testament.
When someone is going to be on TV or a stage, they wait in the “green room.” I’ve been in green rooms and they usually are nice places to get your thoughts together before your appearance. After your appearance on TV or stage, you can go back to the green room and rest. You’re done. My hunch is that many Christians think of Jesus in the green room during the Old Testament, just waiting around for his appearance at Bethlehem and the next thirty years or so. Now, after the resurrection and ascension, Jesus is back resting in the green room. Nope, not only will Jesus make His final advent at the end of times, He’s making advents now and was making advents in the Old Testament.
Martin Luther: “What Moses wrote concerning the patriarchs he did not write primarily for their sakes. They had no need at all of these writings; they were already dead and gathered to their fathers. No, Moses wrote in order that the churches might be instructed and strengthened up to the end of the world.” (Luther’s Works, 5, 223-224) Nothing trite about Advent when we start seeing Christ’s many advents in the Old Testament as well as the New!