Advent celebrates the longing that God built
into the world before Christ. It leads to the celebration of the fulfillment of
the longing of the Jews as we celebrate the incarnation of Jesus with the
twelve days of Christmas. Though God has drawn near throughout our history,
God’s people had always been barred from the inner life of God. But the Son of
God became a man and opened up direct fellowship with God by becoming the door
to that life himself. God has always been the savior, but by taking a body to
dwell among us, Jesus became savior in a new way, and bringing a salvation that
was deeper, broader, higher, and longer in every way. So much so that all the
salvations that God wrought in the past turned out to have been shadows of what
Jesus came to do in the flesh.
Epiphany
is the first day after Christmas and is the celebration of the coming of the
wise men to worship Jesus. As the first Gentiles come to worship Jesus, in them
we see that Jesus is the fulfillment of the longing, not just of the Jews but
of all off the peoples and nations of the world. Just as the gospel went first to the
descendents of Abraham, and then to the Gentiles, we move from Christmas to Epiphany,
but that is just the first act.
Good
Friday, Holy Saturday, and Resurrection Sunday together make up the next
holiday, the cycle of Easter. The word “Easter” is Anglo Saxon for spring equinox.
Easter was calculated using the equinox, and the term for the equinox (Oestra),
according to Bede, gave its name to the Feast of the Resurrection.
(Incidentally, the nation of Austria is also named after the spring equinox.)
We used to worship a goddess that was said to be the
power behind the equinox, but she has been forgotten, and the heavens, which
shout the praises of God, have come to be recognized and understood for what
they are really saying. The word ‘Easter’ itself has been cleansed as the
gospel has gone forth. Easter is now the festival day in which we celebrate the
fact that winter is not just overcome every year; the winter of the world was
overcome when the true spring began. When the Son of God burst forth from the
grave as he was raised from the dead by the power of the Spirit of God, the
winter of the world was wrecked.
With our sin, Adam and Eve cast the world into winter,
but God soon began giving hints of spring, what T.S. Elliot, in his poem
‘Little Gidding,’ calls, “midwinter spring”, where a day with winter on each
side is bright with the hint of a coming spring.
When the short day is brightest with frost and fire
. . . stirs the dumb spirit, not with wind, but with pentecostal fire.
All throughout the Old Testament there are midwinter
spring days, where spring itself does not come, but God makes it clear that the
spring is coming. Resurrection is coming, and history itself will have a spring
equinox, when history turns from winter to spring.
This is why we call this festival Easter. This is why
we named it after Spring, and why Spring itself has come to mean resurrection.
The true meaning of Spring, the actual reason that God set up the cycle of the
equinoxes and seasons, is that God is a God who brings life from death. So
everything in the spring is a legitimate symbol to be used in our celebration
of the resurrection. Be it eggs, rabbits, flowers, dressing the children in new
outfits, or
seeing the ladies in beautiful spring clothes, it is all a wonderful and
legitimate way of celebrating the resurrection when thethe winter of history was
broken and the spring came.
Jesus' resurrection is the turning
point in history because it leads to the revolution of the ascension. Forty days
after the resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven (Acts 1:9). Ascension Thursday is the
day that the church has traditionally set aside to celebrate the installation
of Jesus., that is when he was anointed as King of kings and Lord of lords at
the right hand of God the Father.
It was a revolution because every
authority in the pre-Ascension world was unseated by the work of Jesus. "And
having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly,
triumphing over them in it" (Col 2:15). After the resurrection all
authority on heaven and on earth is given to Jesus (Matt. 28:18). When Jesus
"was received up into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God" (Mark
16:19), the revolution was accomplished, complete, and finished and Jesus was
installed as the ruler of all. Daniel describes the coming of the Son of Adam
to heaven. He gives us a view at the other end of the journey of Jesus'
ascension. The Apostles saw him leave for heaven; Daniel is given a vision of
Jesus arriving in heaven. "I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one
like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of
days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion,
and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve
him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and
his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed" (Dan 7:13-14). In the
ascension, the authority of mankind, the authority that was forfeited when Adam
sinned, was restored to Mankind in the second Adam.
But that restoration does not just
remain with Jesus. Ten days later, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit of
God was poured out on the church and the final restoration of humanity in the
church began. The Church is the body of Christ, and when the Spirit was poured
on Jesus as he was anointed the King of kings and the Perfect High Priest of the
heavenly tabernacle, the Spirit flowed down his head, down his beard, and onto
his body. When Jesus is anointed King he gives gifts unto, his Church, (Eph.
4:8), but the first gift that he gives is himself in the gift of his Spirit. Hence
the name ‘Spiritual’ Gifts (1 Cor. 12:1).
Next we come to Halloween and All
Saints Day. Halloween was not, and has never been, a pagan
holiday. The Christian calendar, because of the Hebrew influence, has always
begun its celebration on what the Romans considered to be the day before. The
first days went from evening to morning (see Gen. 1), but the Romans reckoned
their days from midnight to midnight. Out of Hebrew habit, the feast day celebrations
began the evening before the day of celebration. Because much of the calendrical
reckoning was done with Roman calendars, it felt as if the celebrations were
beginning a day early.
What this says
about the different views of history is a fun question, but for now, what is
important is that is how the party on the eve of a celebration came to find
itself on the calendar as its own event with its own traditions and activities.
Halloween is but the contraction of All Hallows' Eve. All Hallows' (or All
Saint's) is the celebration of the work of God through the church. It is the day
when we make the devil-crushing feet of the Body of Christ dance at the honour
and the joy of it (Rom. 16:20).
All Saints' is
the final hurrah of the church calendar after which we return again to Advent.
Longing remembered, once it is fulfilled, is worthy of celebration. This
longing also becomes a reminder that all of our longing and all of our love for
God will find it's fulfilment in the return of Christ and the final resurrection of the Body,
followed by the judgment of Christ and an eternity of life with God for the
just and eternal death for those outside of Christ.
There are no old
world pagan holidays left on the calendar handed down to us from
Christendom. There have
been a handful of romantic poets and secularists that have wanted to keep the
holidays while jettisoning Jesus, but they have had to make things up and grasp
at straws. The pagan calendars have all been forgotten along with their gods. The
closest that we get is May Day, but no one even remembers who Maia was, let
alone how her day was celebrated in the past. There are still a handful of
names that have remained on the calendar from ancient pagan times. Each of the
seven names of the days of the week are derived from the Roman and Norse names
of the gods of the seven visible planets, (Sun Day, Moon Day, Tiu's Day,
Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Saturn's Day), but the way back to
worship those gods, or to the worship of the hosts of heaven at all, has been
forever blocked and dammed by the resurrection of Jesus. Now the planets are in
the right hand of Jesus (Rev. 1:16), while he seven Spirits represented by the
seven candlesticks of the temple turned out to be but a shadow and a
representation of the seven Spirits of the seven planets as they danced in
light and glory before the holy of holies built without hands (Rev. 1:4, 12-13;
Heb. 9:1-3, 23-24). The principalities of the planets were created to lead us
into the presence of God in the first place. Though in the new covenant that
job has been taken over by the church (Eph. 3:10), there is no reason to object
to the use of the names of these forgotten gods, if only to remember that they
have been forgotten, having been overshadowed by the brightness of the glory of
a crucified and risen Christ. Time is in the hands of Jesus
So as we seek to recover and
reinvigorate the church calendar, we should remember, in a real sense, the calendar
is not for religious activities. We are not renewing the covenant with God during
the feasts of the church calendar, we are remembering, and the remembering
causes us to celebrate. So the primary function of the church calendar is to
remind us of the great works of God on our behalf, And to mark out the time of
our lives according to what God has done in Christ. The primary purpose of the
church calendar is to give a rhythm and vocabulary to our joy, freedom, and
hope.
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