Advent Sunday
Happy New Year! No I haven’t lost the plot completely – today marks the start of a new year in the Church’s calendar. This year for the four Sundays in Advent we are going to be focusing on the Advent Antiphons – who or what are they I hear you ask. They are probably best known to us in the hymn we sang at the start of our service – O come O come Emmanuel.
Each verse of the hymn focuses on a title of Jesus: Wisdom, Lord, Root of Jesse, Key of David, Morning Star, King of the Nations, Emmanuel. Traditionally these formed a response to the Magnificat during the week leading up to Christmas.
As there are seven antiphons and only four Sundays some weeks we will be covering two – this week O Wisdom and O Lord. During the last couple of weeks leading up to Advent we have been focusing on Jesus as King, building up to this extraordinary truth which is foundational to our faith. The same Jesus whose birth as a tiny, frail, vulnerable baby we will be celebrating in a few weeks time is first and foremost God. Wisdom and Lord (Adonai) are divine titles. We can often loose sight of this because we encounter Jesus in the gospels as a human being – albeit a very special one – but the clues are there. Sometimes we need to crack the code as in the gospel reading today when Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man Luke 21:27 or in my favourite Christmas reading from the beginning of John’s gospel when He is referred to as the Word.
The early disciples and apostles, who had known Jesus in the flesh, were in no doubt about His divine nature eg. Paul writes: “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created…..He is before all things and in him all things hold together” Colossians 1:15ff.
In conclusion I have a couple of suggestions to make concerning Advent devotions – one of which will cost you nothing, the other £3. I have downloaded from another church’s website and adapted some ideas for prayer based on the antiphons. How about using these – one for each day of the week. The one that costs is this – an Advent candle produced by Biblelands with titles for Jesus one for each day. As the candle burns meditate on that particular name or title.
Happy new year, may we celebrate Advent well