Our Father: The Heart of Advent
The Old Testament Roots of Christmas' Promise, and why Advent doesn't care who you want to celebrate with
In Isaiah 9, made famous by Handel’s Messiah, we find four titles attributed to the coming deliverer of Israel:
Wonderful Counselor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.
That this passage isn’t directly referenced in the New Testament isn’t really a problem, as Jesus fairly well fits the bill, and this passage sits well with other passages in the Gospels like Luke 1:32-33.
Or, at least three of them fit neatly. The fourth, “Everlasting Father”, creates some interesting difficulties, particularly in the way that Christians have always described Jesus not as the Father, but the Son, the second person of the Trinity. The Son, always and ever with the Father, one with the Father, co-eternal, one in substance and one in person, is yet distinct and inseparable from the Father.
Later in Isaiah 63:16, we find this curious passage that helps us out:
“But you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us or Israel acknowledge us; you, LORD, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.”
Here, one can’t help but see the Gentiles coming, that the one who is the leader of the Gentiles into the Kingdom (their “Father” as it were) does so in a way which doesn’t require them to be Israel in order for them to be of God. Coupled together with the many affirmations of Jesus as being one with the Father in John’s Gospel, and you’re off to the races: the one who is the Messiah of Israel, one with the Father, is the “father” to the Gentiles, creating siblings who are unknown to their brothers.
The problem of supercesssionism—that Israel has been replaced by the Gentiles—is a lingering problem within Christian theology, and likewise has effects within Christian ethics as well. When we talk about Jesus as the ground for an ethic in a way which creates disruption from the Old Testament, and doesn’t self-consciously aim for cohesion across the canon, we’re on shaky ground. The one whom Christians celebrate, the one who is the entry way for Gentiles into God’s kingdom, is Jewish, and to follow that Jesus requires us to never forget this.
That being said, neither are Gentiles obligated to be Messianic Jews in order to be Christian. In Advent, in naming Jesus as Isaiah does, we are reminded of this odd arrangement that is being a Gentile Christian: we are included in God’s promises, but not on our own terms. We are inheritors of a world we did not create, of promises which are first made to Abraham’s line. We Gentiles are those who live in continuity, and yet a non-identical repetition of, what God has done.
This complex relation means also that Advent’s promise is one which forbids ultimate segmenting of the body which is called together in the body of Israel’s Messiah: we may disagree—sometimes deeply—on the ways in which that non-identical repetition occurs, but we may not pretend as if we don’t have the same way into God’s Kingdom, the one whom Isaiah calls “our Father”. Advent is the expectation of being thrown together by the One who Himself is the way in: we are guests at the table, and had best not pretend that our own clothes are fit for the wedding feast.