Advent Is About the Return of the King

Although Pastor David gave us a bonus Sunday last week, this Sunday is the actual first of four Sundays in the Christian calendar in which we look toward Christmas in celebrating the coming —the advent— of the Lord Jesus.

Advent is a season of waiting, of longing, of expectation. And with the unusual challenges of 2020, I am sure many of us feel that it has come in just the nick of time. Perhaps not no so secretly, we can’t help but look forward to Christmas—especially its music, dazzling decorations, nostalgia, laughter, lazy mornings, good food and drink, and elastic waistbands. Surely Advent is an occasion to celebrate all these gifts—and the One from whom they come (and I’m not talking about Santa Claus).

But you’d be excused if you’ve felt contemporary Christmas celebrations to be a bit too sugary for your taste—as though Jesus’s nativity has become a convenient cover for sentimental revelry.  

If you don’t feel the tension, perhaps you should. 

That’s because, if we are primarily looking back to Jesus’s birth, we are looking the wrong way. 

At least, that’s what the ancient church would tell us. During Advent, our forebears in the faith didn’t mainly think of a radiant baby Jesus nestled in a manger full of hay. Jesus, after all, had not only been born, he had suffered, bled, and died in our place and for our sin. His fitness as our substitute and savior had been vindicated in his bodily resurrection, his sovereign rule established in his ascension to the right hand of God the Father, his absolute authority demonstrated in the outpouring of his very Spirit at Pentecost and the astonishing gospel gathering of his children from every tribe, tongue and nation. 

And he had called us to share in his mission—to go out declaring that God had made a way for reconciliation through the Cross of Christ; that he had declared amnesty for all who would trust in Jesus alone for salvation; that his fellowship and care was for any person who would simply come to him by faith, no matter what they had done or undone. That is the good news of Christmas.

The ancient church saw that this gospel mission culminated in Jesus’s return; and with his return would be great celebration, the end of all suffering and sorrow, the righting of all wrongs, the destruction of all evil. Until then, like Israel, the church was in exile. A people waiting in eager anticipation for Jesus’s second advent: the return of their savior, King, and friend.

That’s why, down through history, Revelation 19–20 figure prominently in the church’s Advent celebration. We fast now because we are looking forward to the wedding feast at Jesus’s return. We mourn now because, as the angel tells the apostle John, “happy are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” We look forward, rather than back, because the vision of Jesus seated on a white horse with all the armies of heaven arrayed behind him is much more strengthening than the nostalgia of Christmases past. Because what we need more than a little Christmas right now, is a lot of King Jesus. We look to the joy of his return.

Around 700AD, the church set this Advent longing to words: 

O Come O Come Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lowly exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Immanuel
shall come to thee O Israel

Dear friends, during this Advent season, look at least as much to Jesus’s second advent as his first. The one whose name is Faithful and True is coming to make all suffering and sorrow cease—rejoice in him. The One who is called the Word of God is coming to right all wrongs and mend all that is broken—rest in him. The One on whose robe is written King of Kings and Lord of Lords is coming to defeat his enemies and bring his own to an eternity of joy and peace—live on mission for him.   
And, in light of his second advent, let us look to him now in humble confession:

King Jesus, we confess that our holiday sentimentality is often stronger than our longing for your return. We try to fill the pain of exile with saccharine pleasures rather than looking to your sovereign rule. We fail to live in holiness, as those you’ve ransomed from futile ways. We forget that you have called us, your friends, to be ambassadors of the best news in the world. And because you have loved us even unto death, we can confess these our sins before you now in silence. …