What is the significance of Advent?

It is not too early to think about Advent --- the time on our liturgical calendar when the color vestments are violet and we symbolically know that Christmas is not far away.

Advent is a Latin expression "ad-venio" that means "to come to." Advent comes this year on Dec. 3. The Advent season is only 21 days. According to church practice since 1907, Advent is a period beginning with the Sunday nearest to the feast of St. Andrew the Apostle (Nov. 30) and embracing four Sundays. The first Sunday may be as early as Nov. 27, and then Advent has twenty-eight days, or as late as Dec. 3, giving the season only 21 days.

With Advent a new ecclesiastical year begins in the Western churches. During this time the faithful are urged to prepare themselves worthily to celebrate the anniversary of the Lord's coming into the world as the incarnate God of love, thus to make their souls fitting abodes for the Redeemer coming in Holy Communion and through grace, and thereby to make themselves ready for His final coming as judge, at death and at the end of the world.

It cannot be determined with any degree of certainty when the celebration of Advent was first introduced into the church. The preparation for the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord (Christmas) was not held before the feast itself existed, and researchers find no evidence before the end of the fourth century, when, according to Duchesne [Christian Worship (London, 1904), 260], Christmas was celebrated throughout the whole church, by some on Dec. 25, by others on Jan. 6.

We read in the Acts of a synod held at Saragossa in 380, whose fourth canon prescribes that from the Dec. 17 to the feast of the Epiphany (Jan. 6) no one should be permitted to absent himself from church. We have two homilies of St. Maximus, Bishop of Turin (415-466), entitled "In Adventu Domini," but he makes no reference to a special time.

By the fifth century a "preparation" period was set aside for Christmas. By the sixth century "Advent" was widely celebrated in Spain. By the eighth century, "Advent" was celebrated by most Christians as a period of fast and abstinence. By the Middle Ages, Advent becomes more or less the liturgical celebration that we have today.

Dupe The Deacon is written by Chaplin Deacon Bronson. Email questions to ccm@smu.edu