Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” with power and great glory.
– Luke 21:27
In Advent, the preacher faces the seemingly unenviable task of talking about the apocalypse to a congregation that may have already started to watch Christmas movies. The task is even more challenging. Unexpectedly, the abrasiveness of conventional visions of the apocalypse shares something in common with the sentimentality of Christmas movies: the belief that the present is intractable. Advent instead suggests that our present is counterintuitively undone, undermined from within by Jesus Christ.
Conventional visions of the apocalypse recognize that our world is marked by suffering but imagine that the present must be replaced — this age with a world to come, the unrighteous with the elect. The improbable romances and small-town nostalgia in Hallmark Christmas movies likewise recognize a stressful and constricted world but suggest the present can at least offer space for consolation. After all, some Hallmark Christmas devotees have confirmed to researchers that they find the movies predictable and unrealistic but “I wish that’s how it was in real life.” Viewers less fond of the Christmas season say that these movies are “a great way to escape and it’s easy to get lost in that world.”
Of course, that’s not everyone, but some Christmas films even hint at their unreality. For instance, A Paris Christmas Waltz (2023), made by a Hallmark competitor, seems to frame itself as wish fulfillment. The American protagonist, an “overstressed accountant,” watches a dance concert, and she then says, “That was so magical. I wish I could experience something like that.” As the film proceeds to enjoyable kitsch (snowy Paris at Christmas, well-funded dance competition, romance, saving the French dance studio with those accounting skills), and even invokes “God’s plan,” it presents a theologiae gloriae that has no perch in a world it has self-consciously left behind.
Unexpectedly, A Paris Christmas Waltz also has something in common with a film noir like Lady in the Lake (1947) that’s set during Christmastime to contrast holiday sentimentality with a real world of (nearly) unremitting suspicion and dread. The movie begins with its title cards tossed aside to reveal a pistol underneath, the minor modality of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” intensified. Both films — as well as the apocalyptic vision — acknowledge, if with differing levels of reluctance, that the present is something we must manage, if through imagining a consoling world magically capable of “self-generated healing” (the Christmas movie), maintaining an unsentimentalknowingness in a world of cheap tricks and double-crosses (film noir), or waiting for this world to finally pass away (the conventional apocalypse).
Advent, though, is not about resignation.
In the Gospel reading for the First Sunday in Advent, Jesus tells his listeners “they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory,” and they must “stand up” and “raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near” (Luke 21:27-8). St. Luke’s writings emphasize that this Son of Man is the same Jesus that lived among us, so that his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and finally “coming in a cloud” with royal authority (Dan. 7:13) are transformative of our shared reality. The “Son of Man,” we were told, “must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation” (Luke 17:24-25). Then, the resurrected Jesus Christ is continuous with who he had always been, still bearing the wounds of his rejection. As he ascends, we are told, it will be “this same Jesus” who “will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11), in a cloud. And the martyred Stephen looks to heaven and indeed sees this same “Son of Man” (Acts 7:55-56) already at the right hand of the Father, our shared reality “now taken up into the very life of God.”
The Collect for the First Sunday of Advent asks God for grace “now in the time of this mortal life in which your Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal.” The second-century theologian Irenaeus likewise speaks of Jesus as having “recapitulated” human life from within — through the Spirit he could “dwell in the human race, rest with human beings, … working the will of the Father in them, and renewing them from their old habits into the newness of Christ,” descending so that we might “ascend to life” in this same Jesus.
But how, exactly, is our present undone? Here, the Christmas movie, film noir, the conventional apocalyptic vision, and Irenaeus are all insightful as they reveal what has gone wrong with our reality: envy. In A Paris Christmas Waltz, the obstacle in the plot is a well-positioned and manipulative romantic rival to our protagonist, whose connivance must be a bit improbably softened for the movie to remain consoling. In Lady in the Lake, the private eye’s life and happiness are almost taken by a murderer who has killed her romantic rivals, threatening the film with complete darkness. And, as Timothy Radcliffe has written, the conventional apocalyptic vision is countered by an envy within the elect that threatens any neat division from the unrighteous — at the first century’s end, the writer of 1 Clement recounts, “Through envy and jealousy, the greatest and most righteous pillars have been persecuted and put to death.”
For Irenaeus, the Devil is envious of humanity’s creation in the image and likeness of God. Here Irenaeus echoes Wisdom 2: “for God created us for incorruption and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world.” Thus, the Devil causes humanity’s fall via the serpent; he then infects Cain, whose envy and malice of his brother’s status causes him to commit fratricide; and the Devil’s apostasy is repeated by the Gnostics of Irenaeus’s time, who “pretend to possess superior knowledge … rendering them apostates from Him who made them.” But God exists without envy — “envy is a thing foreign to God” — and has granted “to human beings largely and without envy, by means of adoption, to know God the Father, and to love him with the whole heart.” God does this through Jesus Christ, who replaces our disobedience by returning the Father’s generosity with gratitude, even in a world which rejects him.
As terrible as this world can be, Christ, both fully divine and fully human, shows us, in James Alison’s words, a “human mise-en-scene of God’s immortal vivacity in the midst of human death.” This is a humanity that rejects envy and malice and all claims to superiority held over against others, even upon the cross. Jesus offers forgiveness on the cross (Luke 23:34), as have martyrs in extremis after him, Stephen onward (Acts 7:60). When this same Jesus is at the right hand of the Father and comes back, “the Son of Man coming in a cloud,” he will still bear his wounds, showing us a transformed reality, and he has poured his Spirit out on us (Acts 2:33), so that we can already live in a renewed reality, one in which God’s unenvious generosity is present and gratitude possible even amid vulnerability.
For instance, as Irenaeus writes, Blandina, a “small and weak and despised woman,” hung on a stake and, despite all appearances, “had put on the great and invincible athlete Christ, routing the adversary in many bouts, and, through the struggle, [was] crowned with the crown of incorruptibility.” If that can be true, there is also hope in our reality for the “overstressed accountant” who cannot make it to Paris, an even unluckier private eye in the darkest of films, and even for those who are inclined to see this world just pass away.
So, this Advent, please enjoy your Christmas movies, but take time to “stand up and raise your heads” to see that what is exalted is nothing less than a new way of being human, even amid a reality still marked by suffering, rejection, and death. The world can be an awful place, but Advent tells us that awfulness does not mean the absence of God, for it is here, however dark and cold, that we might meet the One who came to “visit us in great humility,” to descend that we might “rise to the life immortal” in him.
