Preparing For The Coming of Jesus: What Christmas is All About

The Christmas season is upon us. Houses are being festooned with lights and inflated Santa Clauses, reindeer, and elves. Christmas trees are going up and being decorated. Shops and retail stores have decorations, lights, Christmas tunes, and exaggerated joy. This year’s Black Friday sales advertised well in advance have garnered the biggest sales numbers ever. But is this the reason for the season? Is our focus in the right place? The real reason for the season seems forgotten in this material search for joy. Or are all of the lights and the Christmas ditties exaggerated pretenses of joy, manic attempts to avoid the emptiness of this Vanity Fair world we have created for ourselves?

For Christians, this season is called Advent. The word “advent” means the arrival of a notable person or event. For Christians, this time of year is understood as a time of preparation for the Church and for each Christian. It is a concentrated time when we are called to prepare not for an annual birthday party but for the coming of the most “notable” of all persons into our hearts, our daily lives, and our own need for salvation. For the Church and Christians, this notable person is the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, the long-promised Messiah, Jesus Christ.

And He did not just come into the world as an infant, born to the Virgin Mary, in the small town of Bethlehem 2,024 years ago. Jesus came into the world to enter our hearts and minds, our daily lives, now, this day, and every day of our lives. This is the reason for the season. This is what it is for. It makes infinite sense, then, that we spend time during Advent to prepare our hearts, minds, and souls to celebrate the birth of Jesus 2,024 years ago, and to welcome Him into our lives here and now and forever.

Christmas, the Incarnation of God in the flesh, is the event horizon, the still point around which all of reality spins from creation to the end of time. With this long-awaited birth, Heaven came down to Earth and gave humanity access to the divine once again. The Word that was from the beginning, that was with God, through which all things came to be, visible and invisible, came among us to set us free from our greatest enemies, sin and death. It is through this event that God became present to us in the flesh, to fulfill his ancient promise of salvation to us, from the time of Adam’s fall.

“We will never be adequately prepared for the coming of the Savior unless and until we feel in our bones that there is something we need to be saved from,” (Bishop Robert Barron). This, then, is the reason why this Advent season is set aside for us to contemplate the reason for the Incarnation. It was God’s response to our need to be healed, and forgiven for our frailties, our willful faults. And this is the reason why it is a time for true joy. Our joy arises from our experience of the One who “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped” who willingly took on our humanity to bear all of our sins on himself on the Cross, to free us from the powers of sin and death. We rejoice in God’s intimate, enfleshed love for us.

Yes. Advent and Christmas are a joyful season. Why? Because God heard and continues to hear our cries for help. He never fails to respond to our needs. He offers us His infinite, affirming, forgiving love without reservation or hesitation. All he asks of us is our yes. His Christmas present to us is Himself and his generous offer of eternal life with Him. Could there be any better reason for the joy of this season? Could there be a better reason for us to prepare our hearts to receive Him into our lives not just on Christmas Day, but every day? This is why these four weeks of Advent are so important. It allows us to prepare, to focus our proper attention on the real meaning of the birth of Jesus.