Advent: A “Third Coming”

This Advent, I have been reading “Waiting on the Word” by Malcom Guite, an Anglican priest and poet. His book includes a poem and reflection for each day of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. (If you’re looking for a guide through the Advent season that contains beauty, theological depth, and curiosity about and respect for the complexity of the human experience, I cannot recommend this book enough).

In the introduction to the book, Guite discusses the idea of a celebrating a “third coming” during the season Advent. Yes, we contemplate and long for the second coming of Christ when he will judge the living and the dead, establish his Kingdom forever, and restore all things. And to do this fully, we must look to the Incarnation, his first coming as “God with us” over 2,000 years ago. 

But Christ’s first and second comings enable a “third advent:” the many ways that we see Christ drawing near in the present, in the already-but-not-yet, ushering in his Kingdom and bringing light and life, often not in flashy ways, but rather coming to us, as Paula D’Arcy says, “disguised as our life.”

Christ has come. He will come again. And he comes even now. 

For me, I find that this “third coming” is the hardest one for me to fully lean into, the one that feels like it has the greatest risk for radio silence and crushed hope, the one that feels most impossible in the face of all that is not as it should be. Isaiah’s words give me a way forward into watchful, active waiting and hopeful longing: “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” In the wilderness of this world and—Christ, have mercy—in the cracked and dry places in my own heart, Christ enters in, receiving my small, faithful, honest, uncertain acts of preparation as an offering, and transforming (slowly, surely) my heart to have a heightened awareness of where light is breaking through and where is Spirit is bringing healing.

In the tension between longing and fulfillment, between discouragement and the lifting of our heads, between a general sense of “over-it-ness” and daring to hope, “our King and Savior now draws near.”

Yes. Even now.