Advent I

Advent is the season of salvation history. Christianity, or at least Catholic Christianity, has at its centre the incarnate, the concrete, the historical. Christ came at a particular point in time, "in the sixth age of the world", and the life of the Church after him has been tied up with the day-to-day and year-to-year flow of human action and reaction ever since.

We might want to think a bit about the history of Advent itself.

Advent is a relative latecomer. Easter and Pentecost date to the first century. Christmas emerges, maybe, out of the Third Century but really comes blinking into the light in Constantine's day. Lent develops over the Second and Third Centuries.

The earliest reference to a fast before Christmas is in the late Fourth Century, and it took some time after that to become general. Advent seems to have developed in the West out of the Ember Days before Christmas (which have their own convoluted history).

And make no mistake, Advent was a fast. Some kept a full forty days in parallel with Lent ("St. Martin's Lent"); the French réveillon after Midnight Mass is not only a meal after the conclusion of the strict fast of the Christmas vigil, but a feast ending a general fasting season. The entwining of fasting and self-denial with the joyful expectation of the coming of God goes back a very long way in the Church, as it is seen as the way of turning to God and away from the world; the Advent fast was finally abolished only in the early 20th Century.

The expectation of our Lord's first and second coming blended together early on: the traditional advent collects of the missal play on the theme of God raising up ("Excita" is the verb) his power, or our wills. (Advent at one time in some western liturgies lasted six weeks, whence comes the preservation of one such collect as the Sunday Next Before Advent.) The Anglican rite retained only the first ("Stir up Sunday") and the old collect for Advent 4, poised between the incarnation and the parousia.

Advent became the season of the four last things: death, judgement, heaven, and hell, at least as far back as Dante's time.  It is surely a season of expectation, but its expectation drives towards the eschatological.  Only in its final octave does it turn to recalling the events leading up to Christ's birth.

The Anglican Reformation made few changes - Advent remained purple, subdued, eschatological - though it did considerable violence to the sequence of collects, retaining only one. In return, we got one of the best of the Cranmerian collects, which became the refrain of the season. (We also got the rather dull collect for Holy Scriptures Sunday, replacing one beginning "Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to make ready the ways of thy only-begotten". You win some, you lose some.)

"Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christcame to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. "

We might want to put that side by side with the ancient collect for the Sunday, so that nothing may be lost:

"Raise up, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy power, and come: that we may be made worthy of thy protection from the pressing perils of our sins, and may be saved by thy deliverance, who livest and reignest..."

James Burbidge