The coming of the Son of Man

A sermon for the first Sunday in Advent from Fr Michael Bowie

I once spent a very happy summer holiday as the Chaplain of Taormina in Sicily. Sicily has an extraordinary sense of the past as present. We know that much Christian practice, especially the church calendar, was made over from existing pagan and secular celebrations, which is appropriate because of the incarnation. If God was prepared to take human form, then we may be reassured that all human activity belongs to God; the Bible teaches us that creation is good and humanity is sanctified by God’s action in us.

In Sicily, home to so many succeeding civilisations, you can see and touch the past everywhere. In Syracuse the Cathedral is very obviously a Greek temple with walls added between the Doric columns. Deep in the dry centre of the island ancient sites of the mother-goddess Demeter have been made over into churches honouring the mother of Christ. Even in the resort town of Taormina there were plenty of examples of the past breaking through into present life, from the Greek amphitheatre with its spectacular backdrop of Mt Etna playing host to a concert conducted by Ennio Morricone, to the feast of St Pancrazio which I only properly understood in the light of Advent.

San Pancrazio was a 1st century bishop and martyr of Taormina, where some of his relics remain. The little ancient church dedicated to him in Taormina opens only on his feast day. So it was that, on 9 July 1994, I witnessed a procession from the Duomo to the church of San Pancrazio: this was Sicily so it was accompanied by a town band, playing Sicilian opera tunes in which the Anglican Churchwarden’s daughter played the flute. The ancient, retired Archpriest of Taormina, and his housekeeper (let the reader understand), joined the procession in an old Fiat 500; the present Archpriest (and his housekeeper) led the procession bearing a life-size bust of the saint in which the relics were housed. When we reached San Pancrazio’s church, a little wooden railway had been assembled, sloping up from the church door to a throne above the altar. The reliquary bust was placed on a cart and the men of the town took it in turns to pull on ropes, with a great pantomime of straining and panting, to hoist the saint up to his throne, where the Archpriest (without his housekeeper) placed him; cue more opera music and fireworks.

This was all great fun, as one would expect in a Sicilian summer, but I only realised later that this was another Christianisation, relevant to our celebration today. Pagans (and, probably, the ancestors of Judaism) observed a festival of the divinity coming to dwell in his temple at a certain time each year.  

The Latin name of this feast was adventus – the arrival of the god (in Greek παρουσία: the word for Christ’s return in the New Testament). The temple, usually closed, would be opened and a statue of the divinity would be solemnly brought into the main sanctuary. The adventus was a celebration of presence re-emphasised. Once the cult of the emperor spread, his state visits were also known as an adventus and a festival of his adventus was kept each year in the places which he had visited. This was what they were doing with the bust of San Pancrazio, whether or not they now remembered.

What better word than adventus for the visit of the Son of God to earth in the Temple of his flesh? Christians adopted it to emphasise the true coming of divinity into the world. Christmas was originally the winter solstice feast of the birth of sol invictus, the unvanquished Sun, the re-turning of the year towards light in the northern hemisphere. As preparation for Christmas this newly-minted adventus was originally a month-long celebration of the coming of God among us. Then, as our calendar developed, the fullness of the Christmas season was understood to conclude with a second adventus, the coming of the child Jesus into the Jerusalem Temple (Candlemas).

Later, as Lent developed to be the preparation for the greatest feast, Easter, Advent began to be treated like a lesser Lent: a gloomy preparation for the birthday – odd when you think about it – rather than a joyful celebration of it. Here's a good reason why we shouldn't despise the world’s too-early Christmas celebrations: if we join in, we can reclaim the feast; we can do what our Christian ancestors did to their secular festivals.

So, although we keep these four weeks in purple it isn’t supposed to be a time of introspective gloom; it’s supposed to be a time of rejoicing and wakefulness, as the gospel recommends. The purple turns to the white and gold of Christmas as we come to celebrate the coming of Christ, the new unvanquished Sun.

This reminds us of the Easter Vigil, when we celebrate the Christian Passover, the Lord’s passage from death to life, his re-birth, if you like, and ours too. At the Vigil one of the first ceremonies is the blessing of the Paschal candle: that candle which stands in the Sanctuary in Eastertide and there by the font for the rest of the year (to remind us that baptism unites us to the risen Christ; birth and rebirth). In the blessing of the candle these ancient words are used:

Christ yesterday and today
the beginning and the end
Alpha and Omega
all time belongs to him,
and all the ages;
to him be glory and power,
through every age and for ever. Amen.

‘All time belongs to him’: that’s what our calendar and seasons are all about; that is the message of our Christian New Year, today. He is not past but present; we are to be awake to the light, to signs of his presence with us, here at the altar, and all around us in his world. As we just heard the Lord say,

Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. … Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.

‘All time belongs to him’.