Advent: Giving Birth to Christ in You

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. From the Latin Adventus (“coming”), it is a time of watchful anticipation for the coming Christ. In the liturgical tradition, the next four weeks also point us toward the future coming of Christ.

The Second Coming of Christ (from the Greek Parousia, “presence”) has been primarily interpreted by institutional Christianity as a futuristic, literal event when Jesus will return to earth. In the Episcopal Church, we proclaim this reality in the Eucharistic prayer “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” I believe that proclamation, but with a theological twist.

Growing up in evangelical Christianity, I remember sermons about the second coming. These sermons typically involved judgment, violence, and the external appearance of Jesus in the clouds. A closer look at Advent points us not to the clouds or towards a violent reckoning, but to the inner germination of the living Christ in us.

Paul writes in Galatians, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” He also asks, “Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” Later in Colossians, he spells it out more clearly, “And this is the secret: Christ lives in you.” Jesus says something similar. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” And later he urges, “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me.” 

These verses are pointing to the mystery of Advent—Jesus is already here in every human heart. To put it clearly, you are the second coming of Christ. Divinity is in your DNA. Your task is to nurture, cultivate, and awaken the Divine imagine growing in you. To paraphrase medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, what good is it if Mary gave birth to God 2,000 years ago if we don’t give birth to Christ now?

This Advent season, instead of waiting and watching for the Christ in the manger or the return of Jesus in the clouds, look inward to the Christ who is already inside you. “Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world, yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world,” wrote Saint Teresa of Avila.

Join Mary in giving birth to God. Participate in the incarnation, and in so doing labor with God to transform this tired old world so desperate for rebirth.

Gary Alan Taylor