Advent

Word of the Week

I suppose everybody’s noticed that Christmas sales are advertised on television long before Thanksgiving, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an “Advent Sale” or anything remotely resembling an encouragement to prepare the way of the Lord, make straight His paths.  What would an Advent Sale be like?  No sale at all, really.  People might bring out to their sidewalks all the things they do not need, for anybody walking past to take at their pleasure.  That’s a lot easier to do with your household than with your soul.

“Hm, honey, do you think I should get rid of this scrap of pride here?  I’m awfully fond of it.”  “You may be fond of it,” your wife says, with a touch of a smile, “but I don’t know that anybody else ever was.”

An ADVENT, you see, is not just any old approach of something or other.  We don’t await the ADVENT of the dog running back to the house after we’ve called out, “Here, Duke, here, boy!”  An ADVENT implies the approach of something – in our case here, someone – that will shake the world, perhaps to its foundations.  But that still does not capture the full force of the word.  Suppose you are an astronomer, and you see a great asteroid apparently hurtling from nowhere, about to strike the earth dead-on.  That sure will shake the world, and it will be a surprise, but I don’t think we’d call the approach an ADVENT, no more than if a poor drunken fellow were to step unwarily in the path of a speeding car.  But when Cornwallis found himself hemmed in by land and sea at Yorktown, and he surrendered to George Washington, a wise observer might well say that the sun rose on the ADVENT of a new political era.

What I’m getting at is this.  When Saint Paul and Saint Peter and Saint James wrote about the coming of the Lord Jesus in glory, they used a word that suggested his presence already: the Greek parousia.  And that’s the word that Greek Christians use to this day to describe the season before Christmas, when they prepare themselves, with penitence, for the advent of the Lord.  The Greek paron means present, being on the spot.  Jesus himself surely instructed his disciples in this mystery, his both being-here and yet-to-come.  For he says that “the kingdom of God is among you,” and “the kingdom of God is at hand.”  The Son of Man, we are told, will come “like a thief in the night,” or like the rains that fell in the days of Noah, when no one expected them, but we are also told that he is near, even at the gates.  Both are true at once.

Fritz von Uhde, “Journey to Bethlehem” (1890). Public Domain.

And think of the quiet and mysterious weeks that led up to the birth of Jesus.  He was already in the world, because the Word was made flesh when Mary said to the angel, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.”  But the world did not know it.  John the Baptist, in the womb of Elizabeth, leapt up when he heard Mary’s greeting, his first testimony to the presence of Christ.  But no one could see his excitement, and no one but Elizabeth could feel it.  And when the Romans decided that everybody in Judea and Galilee would have to get on the tax rolls, they did not know that the true king was in their midst, or was on the way, approaching, and that the time would come when their great empire would fall, but of his kingdom there would be no end.  Advent, indeed!

Our word advent comes from the Latin, and it’s made up of two parts.  The prefix ad- means to, toward; it is a cousin of the English word at.  The root comes from the Latin verb venire, to come, and you wouldn’t suspect it, but that’s a cousin of words in English from our native Germanic stock that don’t look at all like venire, and of others we’ve borrowed from Greek that don’t look like either the Latin or the Germanic words.  See, the original root in our common parent language was *gwa- / *gwem-, to go, to come.  In the Italic limb of the family, they lost the g sound before the w, leaving us with Latin ven-, pronounced like wen-, till in late Latin that initial w hardened into a v.  It sure is hard to imagine Caesar uttering his famous line, Veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered, and pronouncing it as wainy, weedy, weeky, but, well, it actually was something like that.  In the Germanic limb, the initial g became a c (k), so we get our verb come.  But in the Greek limb, boy, how to explain?  Round your lips tight and say, gw, gw, gw – and now tighten them so far that they touch.  You are saying bw, bw, bw.  So the same root gave us Greek words for going and coming that begin with b, of all things!  Hence Greek basis, meaning a going: when Xenophon led his ten thousand fellow mercenaries from Persia through all kinds of hostile territories to the Black Sea, it was their Anabasis: Going Up, Retreat.

So advent, come, and basis are all cousins.  But my favorite among all their kin is adventure, which didn’t mean something that you planned for yourself.  Just the opposite: it was something that came to you though you did not expect it, something mysterious and dangerous, even something holy.  Moses at the burning bush: that was an adventure.  So was the event we will soon be celebrating.