Advent: Waiting for God, the Great Missionary Who Gives Hope to the World
For those of us who have reached a certain age and who lived through the years after the Second Vatican Council, Advent awakens memories of childhood. It also carries echoes from adolescence. This year marked sixty years since the close of the Council, on December 7. For many, that period shaped how faith was first encountered and lived.
In those years, the “mystery of religion” was woven into daily life. It was gently but firmly marked by the Nativity scene in the home. That mystery was transmitted through the ordinary practices of parish life. Families took part in the Christmas novena. They came together for Sunday Eucharist. Confession, catechism, and parish plays inspired by the infancy narratives of the Gospels all contributed to this formation. Faith also drew strength from a broader social and cultural environment where Christian values were recognized as a shared spiritual and moral heritage, even beyond the Church.
That religious world also found expression in the simple greeting “Merry Christmas,” now often replaced by the more neutral “Happy Holidays.” The older greeting did not conceal the mystery of Bethlehem. Theology names this mystery as the Incarnation of God in the man from Nazareth. Christmas cards made it visible. Some displayed well-known baroque Nativity scenes. Others showed simple, stylized images of poor shelters, home to the Holy Family, the donkey, and the ox. Above them appeared comets and small angels traced in gold, announcing the divine event of the Messiah’s birth.
Is there nostalgia here? Certainly. Denying it would make little sense. Yet this is not a nostalgia that ends in resignation. What endures is faith in the Gospel. The One awaited in Advent, revealed as the Child of Bethlehem, is the One risen from the dead. He lives forever. He gives life even where death seems to erase hope and close off every future.
The One awaited in Advent is the One who continues to come. He is the ever-coming God. Out of love, he does not stop dwelling among us and walking with us on our pilgrimages, even when those journeys lack direction. He walks especially with paths twisted by suffering, marked by unhappiness, and weighed down by remorse for harm done.
For this reason, even if Christendom has collapsed and a certain religious culture has faded, at least in those parts of the Western world where it once took root, Christianity remains alive. Other ways of thinking about life and social coexistence have taken its place. Still, Christianity lives. It lives because God continues to come into the world, accompanying our lives and educating us in what it means to be human. It also lives through the many believers who strive, often quietly, to be credible disciples and witnesses of the incarnate God.
He, the One awaited in every Advent, is the ever-missionary God we celebrate at Christmas. In the mystery of his Passover, he becomes our Hope. This is the hope renewed at every Eucharist. It is the hope that grounds every prayer.
The great theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) said that “the Christian is essentially one who waits.” Advent, without doubt, teaches us this. But the mystery of Christmas tells us something more demanding. It helps us understand that “essentially the Christian is the one who lives in hope, because he knows that God continues to come into the world in order to walk with humanity.” This hope does not remain mute. It transforms life, calls it toward the good, and makes it salt and leaven in history.
From the beauty of this hope, mission is born. We become missionaries of the missionary God, the God who never gives up on being born for each person and on gathering all humanity into a single family.
For this reason, without hesitation or embarrassment. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all, because the One we celebrate is Emmanuel, God with us. And God for us.
By Alberto Gnemmi, OMI
Published on the OMI World website
