It’s tempting to suppose that the New Testament presents us with a choice— a contrast— between two ways. 

The way of Pilate or the way of Jesus. The way of the kingdoms of this world versus the Kingdom not from this world. The way of the Principalities and Powers against the way of the Prince of Peace. 

For instance—

Every year during Passover week Jerusalem would be filled with approximately 200,000 Jewish pilgrims. Nearly all of them, like Jesus’ friends and family, would’ve been poor. Throughout that Holy Week these thousands of pilgrims would remember how they’d once suffered under a different empire and how God had heard their cries and sent someone to save them. 

So every year at the beginning of Passover week, Pontius Pilate would journey from his seaport home in the west to Jerusalem, escorted by a military triumph: a parade of horses and chariots and armed troops and bound prisoners, all led by imperial banners that declared “Caesar is Lord.” A gaudy but unmistakeable display of the way of power.       

At the beginning of that same week Jesus comes from the east. 

His “parade” starts at the Mt of Olives, 2 miles outside the city, the place where the prophet Zechariah had promised God’s Messiah would one day usher in a victory of God’s People over their enemies. There are no palm branches in Luke’s Palm Sunday scene, no shouts of ‘Hosanna.’ Not even any crowds. It’s just the disciples and some naysaying Pharisees and this King who’s riding a colt instead of a chariot. And establish peace. 

Two different parades.

From opposite directions.

One comes on a chariot and the other on a mangy colt. 

It’s tempting to think what the Bible gives us is a choice between two contrasting ways in the world. 

When Jesus and his entourage get to the Mt of Olives, this place that’s charged with prophetic meaning, it’s not his teaching they want to acclaim. It’s his deeds. The mighty deeds. The deeds of the power. The healings and the miracles. As if to say: if Jesus can do that just imagine what he can do to our enemies. 

It would be easy to believe that what we’re supposed to see in this Holy Week story is a choice before us between two different ways, the way of his Kingdom or the way of the world. 

Except for what comes next—

With the city in view and our excited shouts of mighty deeds ringing in the air, Jesus falls down and he cries. He weeps. Like he did before his dead friend’s grave, he weeps: “If you, even you, had only recognized the things that make for peace.” Because after every sermon, every beatitude and parable and teaching moment his disciples—we— still don’t get it. Having been given all the ingredients, we still don’t recognize the things that make for peace.

His raw grief makes it plain: whatever is wrong in our world will need to be made right by another other than us.

The way of the world can’t be left to the likes of us. 

Cut the bullshit— you can’t even be relied upon to spend less at Christmas despite your resolutions to do so.

Fleming Rutledge notes that at Advent— the season of the Second Coming— Christians recall that what the New Testament presents us with is not, fundamentally, a choice between two contrasting ways in the world. If we were capable of such a choice, Christ need not have come at the First Advent. If we could be relied upon to make such a choice, we would not have required Christ’s cross— nor would we find ourselves again this season, in the darkness we have wrought, longing for his Second Advent. 

So much of the redemptive drama is superfluous if it’s simply a matter of our choosing between the way of the world or the way of the one whom the world crucifies.

When we render the story as a study in contrasting ways in the world, we presume that we have a will sufficiently free and a capacity powerful enough to choose between them. The New Testament does not so grant us. 

Advent is anathema to America and its illusions about free will. We are not free. We are freed. We are freed only by the Gospel of grace scripture teaches: “For freedom Christ has set you free…” Until then, we are slaves to the Pharoah of Sin and Death. 

What psychology confirms (just ask Timothy Wilson at UVA— we make ‘free’ rational decisons only about 20% of the time), the 39 Articles of John Wesley’s prayerbook long ago asserted:

“The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.”

What the New Testament presents us with is not a choice between two contrasting ways but a collision of two ages. 

Notice—

If it’s about choosing which of possible ways, we’re the subject of the sentences.

If it’s about ages colliding, God is the only possible subject of the sentence.

And we’re the objects desperately seeking a Subject with powerful verbs of his own.

As the Apostle Paul says in Galatians and Romans and Corinthians…the cross of Jesus Christ is God’s “invasion” (apocalypse) into “this present evil age.” I know lots of folks loathe to sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” but it’s martial language the New Testament uses. Creche and cross and the cracked, empty tomb are God’s invasion against the “Ruler of this Age” (Satan). This is why the Gospels— all four of them— begin by presenting John the Baptist as the “herald of the turning of the ages.” With John, Malachi— the prophet who concludes the Christian Old Testament— gets vindicated. Malachi foresaw another Elijah, one who would signal the end time by announcing the arrival of another who would lift the curse of Sin from the world.

If two ages, the old aeon and the new aeon, have collided in God’s invasion that is Christ Jesus, then Christians are not better people than non-Christians.

Rather, Christians are people who know better than non-Christians that we live in an in-between time, stuck between the already of the ages colliding in creche and cross and the not yet of that collision’s consummation, which Christians call the second coming. 

Not yet. 

The grammar of not yet necessitates waiting.

But waiting is nonsensical if it’s simply a matter of our choosing which of the ways in the world the Bible offers us. 

Like Godot, you can only wait for Another. 

Jesus is the reason for the season, the cliches carp. 

But really, we’re the reason for the season.

As Fleming writes:

“Unlike today’s enthusiam for religious ‘journeys’ or ways, the New Testament was written against the backdrop of the two ages, each with its own cosmokrater, its ruling Power. Two world orders are opposed to one another (Paul calls them flesh and Spirit). This represents a break with any idea that human beings can make progress toward bringing the kingdom of God to pass. Only God can do that, by inaugurating a wholesale-change of regime. This is what he has done in the invasion of the old order by the new in Jesus Christ.”

On this side of creche and cross, during Advent we await the New Age begun in the New Adam to come to completion. 

Therefore at Advent— this season of the Second Coming— Christians anticipate what we cannot on our own make come to pass. Advent begins in the dark because Advent awaits the arrival of what we cannot do on our own or for ourselves. Advent anticipates not a choosing of ways in the world but the commitment of the coming God who WILL have his way be done in his world.