A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Advent 1C + 2C
The text: Luke 1-2
This season of Advent, the beginning of the church year, the time of preparation for the incarnation, began with apocalypse and continues with prophecy.
What this does for us as readers of scripture, though, is to place us into parallel preparations. Yes, the Advent, of the return of Christ as we read about the coming of Christ, but also another: our preparation to hear the telling of the incarnate Christ in his birth while hearing the prophecy this week of the incarnate Christ in a man already born.
The chronology, while not particularly complex, does add a layer of potential obscurity, of potentially misguiding our interior timelines. For those who read the gospel of Luke will read of much activity in the first two chapters, of much taking place before Jesus is born to the miracle of his birth, and even to his time, at twelve, of visiting the Temple. In short, that magical, pastoral image of the incarnation we cherish on Christmas has already taken place and is now decades in the rearview when John reappears to baptize people in the Jordan.
Again, I don’t mean to suggest that people can’t follow this or remain blissfully unaware. It is that this layer of complexity throws our expectations off a hair. And perhaps we should be mindful, not merely of what we anticipate in the season, but what it is that John is anticipating in the story. And I think this is the most essential character of Advent!
John isn’t predicting the physical birth of a baby who will grow up to become the savior—he is announcing his immediate coming! And his coming into a world full of men who serve powerful positions in governments, who rule over other people unaccountably, and who are themselves obstacle to the divine project.
This is one of the things we struggle with this time of year—the celebration we are looking forward to and planning for, Christmas, is about the incarnate God, the Messiah, the savior of humankind. And what John symbolizes is not the birth part of the incarnation, but the saving part. Which is not purely an issue with chronology, but with values, because a lot of people want to plan for the baby, not the grown man’s revolution.