In the season of Advent I would often use the gospel song, "Soon and Very Soon," after we pass the peace in worship. One year I got pushback on this when someone noticed that the song appears in the section of the hymnal dedicated to funerals. "How is is it appropriate for this season for us to be singing about dying?" she asked.
"It says we're going to see the King," I replied. That's what we're doing in Advent, isn't it? Going to greet the newborn king?"
But the connection to death is still there, and not unimportant. Dietrich Bonhoeffer noted that, "When Christ calls someone he bids them come and die." Jesus repeatedly teaches about how we need to die in order to live, and Paul indicates how baptism is a symbolic death. Death is not annihilation so much as transformation. I am reminded of the monastic motto: "If you die before you die then you won't die when you die."
This focus on death and transformation is one of the Advent themes that receives too little attention. As we make our way to the manger in Bethlehem we expect to find a cute little baby, harmless and vulnerable. We expect to bring our gifts to him and worship him. We do not necessarily expect to die in the process. We do not expect to emerge from the stable completely different from when we went in to see him.
But unless we do, we have really not seen him at all. The story is ridiculously familiar and thoroughly domesticated. We know it by heart and cherish its telling. But if we look at this infant and don't see in him the King of Creation, and ourselves as his subjects, we have missed the message of the Nativity. The only way we indicate that we see him as the King, is by realizing that we are bound to do whatever he tells us to do.
Of course, this is America and we don't know from kings. We have no experience with or tolerance for the idea that there is someone, anyone, literally entitled to our unconditional obedience, especially someone who received their status by accident of birth. The actual monarchs who remain in this world are at best noble and unifying, if anachronistic, figureheads, and at worst rich, celebrity jerks. There is no question of our having to give our absolute obedience to any of them. The idea is laughable.
But Jesus is a king, but also different from other human monarchs in not depending on tradition or genealogy as the source of his legitimacy. They pretended their right to rule came from God... but it did not. Only Jesus' monarchy is the true and only expression of authority because he is the Author. By him the universe was created and held together in being. He is the embodiment of the Creator, authenticated, not by ceremonial pomposity and coercive power, but by his simplicity, humility, generosity, and self-emptying love. Through him God's Presence, goodness, truth, and beauty flows into the creation.
In submitting to him, to this King, the True King, Jesus Christ, we have to let go of our ego-centric identities. We have to see ourselves in a radically different way, and define ourselves by a fundamentally different story. We have to relinquish the comfortable illusions of our individualism, autonomy, and independence. We turn from one way of seeing everything to embrace another. We move from one way of thinking to a completely different one. We have to repent, reorient our minds and our lives so that we are no longer motivated by selfish fear, desire, and anger, but instead see ourselves as interconnected, interdependent parts of a larger whole, in Jesus Christ, our King. This repentance is what it means to die to our old selves that our new Self may emerge in us.
In other words, becoming a subject of the King means dying to who we thought we were. We give up our sense of being isolated individuals, and come to participate together in Jesus Christ. We become part of his self-expression and unity with and in all creation. We move from a sense of being separate from all things, to an awareness of being integrated into a nest and network of communities of creation. Hence, some choose to use the language of "commonwealth" here, which expresses well the horizontal aspect, how we relate to each other within creation.
Here we also find the meaning of the Eucharistic meal as the place where we "see the King" regularly, eating his Body in order to become members of his Body, together.
Unless we become Christ, we haven't really seen Christ; but we can't see Christ until we become Christ. This is the challenge of the Advent and Nativity moments: to use this preparatory time to shed our false and destructive self-images in order to live into the Image of God within us and become subjects of the King, whose lives are shaped according to Christ's life of compassion, justice, equality, freedom, peace, and goodness.
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