From Advent to Pentecost: the Meaning of World History

As we’ve recently come to the end of Paschaltide, the Easter season, with the celebration of the Solemnity of Pentecost, it seems fitting and perhaps needful to reflect on what might be thought of as a “meta-season” of the Church’s liturgical year, the period from Advent to Pentecost. In our secular culture we’re habituated to thinking of the “year” in two different senses: the calendar year of 1 January to 31 December, and the Fiscal Year of 1 July-30 June. For Christians there is a third division, that sacred division centered around Advent, the beginning of the Liturgical year which, as it begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, can begin as early as 27 November or as late as 3 December.

I propose that we can think of the Liturgical year as divisible into two main parts as determined by the nature of the preponderance of sacral days not dedicated to particular saints: the historical (rooted in actual events), and the thematic (rooted in ideas). The period from Advent to Easter is the time of the great historical moments of the Gospel: Advent, Christmas (with the Nativity, Epiphany, and Presentation and Baptism of the Lord), Lent with Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum, and Easter which begins with the Feast of the Resurrection and comes to its grand finale with Ascension and Pentecost. The thematic period is marked more profoundly by the “feasts of ideas,” beginning with the Feasts of the Holy Trinity and the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi) and ending with Christ the King. Of course there are “thematic” moments during the historical season (e.g. Mary Mother of God occurs 1 Jan and so during Christmas), and “historical” feasts during the thematic season (e.g. the Assumption of the BVM and the Transfiguration of the Lord, and also the Nativity and Presentation of the BVM), so these categories are more heuristic than scientific, but they need be no more than that so long as we can see the truth in them and find them helpful, which I hope we can.
 

Advent and Christmas

The opening chapters of the book of the prophet Haggai speak of the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple as the return and fulfillment of the “glory of the Lord” to the world, which splendor is not merely the hope of Israel but in fact “the desire of nations,” the secret hope of all the world, in fact of the entirety of human history. It is Christ himself who is to be the new Temple, not “made by human hands” (Acts 7:48), but the one from whose side flows the living water which brings eternal life (cf. Ezekiel 47) which freshens the whole earth, in fact, creates “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1) and lights the new creation by his own light. “The temple [of the new creation] is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” and “by its light will the nations walk and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it” (Rev 21:22-24). Advent and Christmas represent the culmination of the hope of world history and the beginning of the fulfillment of that hope.
 

Lent and Passiontide

The true history of the world is about the hope and fulfillment of salvation born in man since the moment of the fall (cf. Gen 3:15 “she shall crush thy head, and you shall bruise his heel”). But this history, as we see at the end of Genesis 3 with the banishment of our first parents from the Garden, is marked by suffering and penance. The redemption of world history, then, is so marked—by the suffering and penance of God Incarnate for the salvation of the world. It is that history that we relive during the Lenten season and Holy Week.
 

Easter—the fulfillment of the Paschal Mystery in the victory of Christ over Sin and Death

We should not think of the Resurrection of Christ as the “end of history” but rather as the fulcrum, the center, and in fact the “middle” of it—the moment, if you will, which henceforth controlled the meaning both of the past and the future of all time-bound creation. The fundamental victory of God in Christ over sin and death has been achieved, and it is certainly this that we celebrate during the Easter season. But we also celebrate the advent of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church, who, launched on her mission to bring the Gospel to the whole world and to every creature, to baptize and cast out evil and heal the sick (cf. Mark 15: 16-18), gives witness to the world separated from the knowledge of God that God has irrupted into history and redefined, as it were, its trajectory. World history will continue, though not as before. The world is engaged, from the moment of the Resurrection, in the final stage of the struggle between good and evil, and this struggle is defined fundamentally as that of the Church “against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12).
 

Anno Domini: the Last Act of the Play of History

Yet the struggle between good and evil, God and the Powers of Darkness, plays out in the secular realm as well as in the Church herself. The “secular” in our time is really defined as the worldview of radical immanence, what the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the immanent frame”: there is no God involved in human history, and so “religion”—especially Christianity—must be understood relative to the major movements of ideas and socio-political and economic forces (or some other set of structures) in history and in our time, as subordinate to them and as a product of them. This means that in the realm of the secular, Christianity will be misunderstood, and the claims of the Church misinterpreted—even by her secular allies!—such that those faithful to the true meaning of Christianity and the true mission of the Church will increasingly stand alone, suffering in various ways the persecution that comes from the world’s miscomprehension, which often turns to hatred. Christ himself prophesied that this would happen.

“They will seize you and persecute you. They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors, and all on account of my name. ¹³ And so you will bear testimony to me. ¹⁴ But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves. ¹⁵ For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict. ¹⁶ You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. ¹⁷ Everyone will hate you because of me. ¹⁸ But not a hair of your head will perish. ¹⁹ Stand firm, and you will win life” (Luke 21:12-18).

We recall the principle “where sin increases, grace abounds” (Rom 5:20), yet it remains a strange truth that, although sin is inexpungible except by grace, grace also increases sin. We are perhaps more used to this truth when we put it another way: with an increase in knowledge of the good and firmness of intention to pursue it (which grace gives) comes a proportionate increase in culpability for wrongdoing. We recognize this principle even in civil law, and certainly in the Church. The principle is writ large when it comes to the issue of the Incarnation and its effect on the character and trajectory of world history: while the appearance of Christ signals the final victory of God, in a certain way and perhaps, we might say, “in the short term,” the Incarnation makes things worse for the world. Much worse. Sin increases where grace abounds. The spirit of antichrist truly enters the world with the Spirit of Christ, thus dividing the world starkly into those who are for, and those who are against, Christ

“Every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already” (1 John 4:3).

Without Jesus there is no Judas Iscariot, for there is no incarnate divine friend to betray. Before the Incarnation, God existed in the law of Israel and in the conscience of every person (cf. Rom 2:14-15). But it is as if, at my baptism, a little Judas entered into my heart as well—for Christ invited his betrayer into his intimate circle, knowing that he would betray him. The world “B.C.” can only intentionally rebel against God to the extent that it understands him, and when God appears in the flesh, the understanding—or at least the possibility of that understanding—is increased by an order of magnitude, for Christ in a certain way unites himself to every human person in the very act of his Incarnation. In the Incarnation, the very relation of the human nature and the human person to God has been forever changed.

It is especially so for the body of the baptized. And this is why the Church in the world is called in the Sacred Tradition the “Church Militant.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church refers obliquely to the classic division of the “three states of the Church” (Militant on earth, Suffering in purgatory, Triumphant in glory) when it states that “When the Lord comes in glory, and all his angels with him, death will be no more and all things will be subject to him. But at the present time some of his disciples are pilgrims on earth. Others have died and are being purified, while still others are in glory, contemplating in full light, God himself triune and one, exactly as he is” (CCC 954).

A pilgrim lives with the self-consciousness that, among those who are striving to make themselves at home in the immanent frame, he is an alien among natives. And, as René Girard reminds us, the alien is always suspect, a ripe target for scapegoating by mass society. As western civilization emerges from its abnormal, albeit long, phase of Christendom, the Christian is increasingly exposed and at risk wherever he may be. Only the Christian who understands himself as fundamentally on the way (in via), a pilgrim in history, will understand himself properly not only in his own history but in the history of the world—as living in the center of the open secret of world history:

“I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33)

Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis. He is a frequent contributor to MSPCatholic.