Advent in Armidale this year coincided with something of a second Spring, though the date would testify to it being the beginning of Summer: the late arrival of the seasonal storms a couple of weeks prior has brought a fresh flush of growth and a second, more vivid flowering to our garden. Plants which I didn’t know would flower (we have only lived here since May) have burst into bloom, and the effect is even more delightful than when the morning frosts first retreated back in September. Our pomegranate trees have put out a rich covering of their little red bell-shaped flowers, and I hope that a generous harvest of fruit may follow.
I don’t yet know if this is a normal pattern for Armidale, but as my excitement that it is Advent seems to be bouncing off my excitement about our garden in a perpetuating cycle of delight, I’ve been struck by the felicity of this arrangement. And it has prompted me to take up again a question I’ve turned over in my mind over many Advent seasons, which is the symbolic oddity of Advent and Christmas in Australia.
I have spent two Advents of my life in the Northern hemisphere and the contrast should go without saying, but let me say just a little. The day shortens as the night lengthens, the cold deepens and perhaps brings the first smatterings of snow. All the trappings of the approaching Christmas season make perfect sense under such conditions: cozy candlelit (or fairylight-lit) interiors that provide a haven in the cold weather; homes adorned with evergreen trees that are the only remaining source of foliage; warm and comforting food; hymns in minor keys. Symbol and season align.
In Australia we enjoy the odd coincidence of historically British Christmas traditions and cultural fodder exported by American media, and the arrival of Summer. A wide array of Australian Christmas Cringe has arisen as an attempt to resolve this symbolic conflict. Surfing Santa icons. Sleighs drawn by kangaroos. Aussie Jingle Bells. T-shirts with mock Christmas-knit prints. All designed to elicit laughter, or at least a knowing smile. Because, you know, we’re Australian and we love to wear Santa hats at the beach and we love to laugh at ourselves doing it.
Unfortunately, as well as being the opposite of anything serious, pretty much all of the Australian Christmas paraphernalia is purely self-referential. I know that we are not unique in this respect. In de-Christianising countries the world over, Christmas symbolism is being reduced to the representation of…celebrating Christmas. That time of year we all get together and give gifts and feast and celebrate…getting together and giving gifts and feasting?
And so, as someone who wants Christmas to be about the birth of Christ, I am left with the sense of a symbolic vacuum. This is not a very satisfying state of affairs. Australian evangelicals are very quick to remind ourselves and anyone else who may be watching that Christmas is not ‘about’ the paraphernalia of gingerbread houses and decorated trees and gift-giving; it is about the anticipation and arrival of Christ. It might be true that Christmas is not ‘about’ the paraphernalia, but why can’t our paraphernalia at least be about Christmas? Why do we insist on seeing through the festivities as a host of meaningless distractions? I am starting to think the problem may not lie simply with a generalised symbolic insensitivity (though I do think we have this problem), but also with a particular confusion about the symbols relating to Advent and Christmas.
This symbolic confusion is certainly due in part to the coopting of the Christmas season by our culture of consumerism, but perhaps not in whole. Even once we have made the effort to extract all that is idolatrous from our Christmas ornaments and activities we are still left with the question of what our northern-hemisphere centric traditions actually have to say to us. This is the question I have given myself to thinking on over the past couple of weeks.
Symbols have histories
Jonathon Gibson recently set me to right about the origin of this portion of the Christian calendar:
Since the days of the early church, Christians have also observed a time in the church calendar for a more focused concentration on the second coming of Christ, known as Advent. Its origins go back to the fourth century when converts prepared themselves for baptism. As the centuries passed, the season of Advent became more directly connected to Christmas—a time to consider Christ’s second coming as Christians reflected on his first coming. Often it involved a period of fasting and prayer (Advent is also known as ‘little lent’) in preparation for the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25 (in the Western church) or January 6 (in the Eastern church). Contrary to popular opinion, the date of Christ’s birth on December 25 is not due to a pagan holiday that has been repurposed by Christians; rather, the date is based on a belief that Christ died around the same time he was conceived. The two dates commonly held for his death are March 25 (in the Western church) and April 6 (in the Eastern church). If this was the date on which he was also conceived, then his birth would have been around December 25 or January 6, depending on the respective church traditions.
Gibson, ‘O Come O Come Emmanuel’, pp. 29–30.
Having done away with the winter solstice origin myth, the first thing this tells me is that the time of Advent is only dictated by the seasons insofar as Passover/Easter is so dictated. It is not first and foremost a nod to light out of darkness, to subsumed (or redeemed?) pagan celebrations, nor to a natural desire to feast during winter time when there isn’t much else to do.
Thus the first thing we must say is that we celebrate Advent when we do because we take Christmas Day to be the day of the year actually corresponding to the day of Christ’s birth. God has set time on a solar cycle, and allowed us an experience of return to corresponding times of significance through that cycle.
Now, it is worth contemplating the fact that our calendars are determined by a global synchonicity rather than the cycle of seasons. One can imagine an alternate universe in which the Australian new year begins in July rather than January and mirrors the Northern hemisphere association between the conclusion of the year and the start of Winter.1 If we shift the holidays accordingly, we might then have our Advent and Christmas in Winter and our Easter in Spring. This would be another way of re-entering the approach of the ‘time’ of Jesus’ birth, and by this means lay claim to the symbolism of gathering darkness and the coming of light.
However, apart from the impracticality of such a change in our thoroughly globalised century, the history of the Australian church weighs against it. Christ came in the flesh in the Middle East somewhere around December 25 at the opening of the first century A.D. He came in the Spirit to Australia more than 1700 years later, by way of some British Christians. On the 3rd of February, 1783, the Reverend Richard Johnson conducted the first church service on Australian soil, under a great tree. Each year on the 1st of July, the Torres Strait Islanders commemorate the arrival of members of the London Missionary Society to Erub Island in 1871 as ‘The Coming of the Light’. Word has it that Dabad the Elder of Erub Island came out to greet the missionary boats armed and anticipating battle, but the Reverend Samuel McFarlane met him on his knees with a Bible held out in his hands; thus came the light of Christ to the distant isles and coastlands of Australia.
Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my Spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street;
a bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench;
he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be discouraged
till he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his law.
Isaiah 42:1–4
As St. Augustine would have us remember, the whole Christ includes his Church. Christ has, we might say, continued to come since he first arrived on that December day in Bethlehem. It is therefore fitting that our practices of anticipating and celebrating his coming in Australia should be tied to our particular history of his coming to our land. Our northern-hemisphere traditions are not a random historical contingency, but a real symbolic heritage. We continue to celebrate Advent and Christmas synchronously with the global church because this befits an event which promised to bring the most distant lands under the one just rule of the newborn King.
I don’t mean by this that our church calendar in Australia should be self-consciously retrieving our British colonial history or some such thing, but I do mean to free us from a fundamentally ironic relationship to our symbolic heritage. Our received symbolism should not be merely the butt of a joke, but embraced as a sign that God has made good on all that he promised by the coming of his Servant. If therefore God did not cease to providentially arrange history after the first century A.D., perhaps he continues to mean something by Christmas in Australia just as he would remind us by a wintry European Christmas that the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.
History hasn’t finished
Advent, as Gibson reminds us above, connects Christ’s first coming to the anticipation of his second. It is in this vein that I wish to proffer a theory: Advent and Christmas in the southern hemisphere speak most vividly of Christ’s final coming, not his first.
The scriptural themes I will draw on to defend this theory concern Jesus coming to inspect and receive his harvest of fruit.2 I could go many places in Scripture for this, pretty much anywhere concerned with the Day of the Lord, but since I’ve been reading Mark recently I’ll draw mostly on that Gospel.
Ready in and out of season
On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And his disciples heard it.
Mark 11:12–14
This scene is immediately preceded in Mark by Jesus’ first appearance in the temple upon arriving in Jerusalem. He goes in, looks around at everything, and then goes away. What is he doing? Inspecting it for fruit. And the encounter with the fig tree makes clear what the consequences are. He returns the next day to the temple to overturn tables and pronounce the temple of the Lord a ‘den of robbers’, a pronouncement reflected in the withered fig tree which Peter observes on their way back into the city the next morning.
But Lord, how unfair to the fig tree! — for Mark informs us that it was not the season for figs. This is the source of Advent’s tension: the Master will come, and we know not the hour of his coming: stay awake. Christ’s actions towards the fig tree and the temple first of all prefigure his coming in judgement on Jerusalem to destroy the temple in A.D 70, but all such judgements continue to be anticipations of the final coming and judgement at the end of time.
Those that God has set over his house, in particular, will be held to account, although this is only a more serious case of the judgement we will all face for our works. The Apostle Paul warns Timothy accordingly:
I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.
2 Timothy 4:1–2
God’s people cannot come before his judgement seat with the excuse that they weren’t ready, that if they’d just had a little more time their season would have arrived and the fruit of their good works burst forth.
This is not all cause for somber reflection, however. It is also a source of hope. Just as the judgement on Jerusalem in A.D. 70 was ultimately good news for the elect church, for those in Christ his coming is a time of vindication and an answer to our faithful waiting.
Thus Advent as anticipating the coming judgement is, in a sense, season-less. But not entirely.
Summer is near
In the parable of the tenants, Jesus says that the owner of the vineyard sent his servant to receive from the vineyard’s fruit ‘when the season came’. The tenants certainly hadn’t the excuse of the fruit not being in season; they should have been ready to hand over their harvest. He tells this parable to the chief priests and scribes (whom God had at that time set over his house) right after they come to him questioning his authority to do what he has just done in the temple. Jesus corners them, not on the source of his own authority, but on that of the baptism of John: if they had recognised John’s baptism as from heaven, they would have known that Jesus’ authority came from the same place. John, as Mark told us from the beginning of his Gospel, came to prepare the way for Jesus with a baptism of repentance. If the chief priests and scribes had only listened to John, they would have known that the time for harvest was nigh.
Not long after this episode the sign of the fig tree returns, this time as part of Jesus’ teaching about the coming judgement on Jerusalem:
From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts out its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates.
Mark 13:28–29
The fig tree, like the grape vine, fruits in summer, not long after its first spurt of new growth in Spring, and is a symbol throughout the Scriptures of God’s people Israel. While not saying that his coming will in actuality coincide with Summer, the symbol of Summer’s imminence is nonetheless fitting: God is coming to shine a light on his people, to inspect and receive the fruitful harvest of their good works. We are reminded that his judgement is in fact good news, for on the disastrous circumstances that Jesus describes as the signs of his pending judgement on Jerusalem is overlayed a mood of exultation.
Christ has come. Summer is here.
In Australia, as elsewhere in the southern hemisphere, Christmas lands just after the longest day of the year. As the yearly dark is driven into its smallest corner of time, we are given a foretaste of Christ’s second coming after which there will be no night.
Have a happy, hot and sunny-bright Christmas, wherever in the world you may be. Let us enter the new liturgical year ready to bring the fruit of our good works to God, in thankfulness for the life he has granted us by his first coming in the flesh.
A quick foray into Wikipedia and National Geographic articles about Roman calendars brought two points to my attention that would further illuminate such a strange universe as the one I am imagining here: First, the form of the calendar was dictated by the two factors of religious observances, such as the time of Rome’s founding, and agricultural patterns, with harvest time concluding the year. To this extent such a change as I am imagining might possibly be justifiable. Second, however, the development of the calendar into forms more recognisable to us was a matter of historical contingencies. Months were added and days retracted in drips and drabs and halts and starts over centuries, and we can hardly describe the result as an entirely rational scheme. Thus, though a calendar governed by seasons might seem more rational than one contingent upon the settlement of Australia by the British Empire, the radical change would justly strike the reader as absurd because this is simply not how calendars come about. To compound the absurdity, there is huge variation across Australia as to whether anything approaching four seasons is clearly discernible. Why not bound the year by the two seasons of Wet and Dry?
What follows is an expansion of an idea that emerged from a conversation with my husband, and it was probably mostly his idea. He has graciously let me develop it here instead of writing about it himself.
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