Advent and "captive Israel"
Inhabiting the ancient—and present—longing for deliverance
This past Sunday was the first day of Advent, a distinct season of the Christian calendar that inaugurates the liturgical cycle and is meant to prepare us for Christmas. Advent is to Christmas as Lent is to Easter. It’s a preparatory fast that has, along with the rest of the church calendar, grown remarkably popular among low-church evangelicals in recent years.
(My wife and I started a website years ago called Keeping Advent & Christmas, which seeks to explain these distinct seasons and help Christians keep them well. It features resources, including an annually updated Family Guide to the Seasons, with traditional prayers and Scripture readings to give structure to your fasting and feasting.)
What I have come to love about Advent is the way it resonates with the Bible’s messianic themes, compelling us to inhabit the longing of Israel for a redeemer. Consider this week’s reading from Isaiah, the most prominent prophetic voice in the Advent season:
Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down,
That the mountains might quake at your presence—
As when fire kindles brushwood
And the fire causes water to boil—
To make your name known to your adversaries,
And that the nations might tremble at your presence!
But it’s not just the Hebrew prophets that sound this theme. During yesterday’s Advent sermon, I was reading from Luke 1, rehearsing the song of the priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist:
Blessed be the Lord God of Israel,
for he has visited and redeemed his people
and has raised up a horn of salvation for us
in the house of his servant David,
as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old,
that we should be saved from our enemies
and from the hand of all who hate us;
to show the mercy promised to our fathers
and to remember his holy covenant….
It struck me how foreign and distant this language must seem to most Christians today, at least those in America and the broader West. We don’t tend to talk much about “enemies” and “hate” in church, except to disclaim them as relevant theological categories.
But they are categories our Jewish friends understand all too well, especially after the heinous events of October 7 and the torrent of global and local antisemitism—the oldest hatred—those events unleashed.
They bring fresh relevance to Zechariah’s longing for Israel’s deliverance. They are a reminder that salvation, in the biblical and messianic sense, is not—or not just—an internal, psychological comfort about one’s eternal destiny. It is tangible deliverance from real and present enemies. Biblical salvation is physical before it is metaphysical.
In this sense, Advent reminds us—or at least reminds me—that these ancient messianic longings remain essentially unfulfilled.
Christians jump too easily to what they see as the end of the story, pausing neither to inhabit the ancient longings nor to see them as still very much alive in our day.
At church this Sunday, we sang the lines from the oldest Advent hymn:
O come, O come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
Millions of Christians around the world will sing these lines this year, as every year. But I wonder how many will think of the real captives—women subjected to sexual violence by Hamas terrorists, children kidnapped and still held hostage, some after watching the murder of their parents.
This Advent I am praying for them.
As a Christian, I am called to pray for the salvation of my enemies. And so I will.
But as a believer in the Bible—a book that relates God’s unfolding of salvation history—I am also praying for salvation from enemies. I am praying with Zechariah that these captives especially will be saved from the hand of those who hate them and, by extension, hate us.
The salvation of God is both universal and particular. To echo Mary’s song after the visit from the angel, “His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation [l’dor v’dor].” But her song ends with a reminder of both the means and the ends of that salvation:
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring forever.