My Christmas tree has been up for a while—since before Halloween, in fact. Many people have strong feelings about that, not least church people with a healthy respect for the liturgical calendar. Christmas, they reason, comes at a certain time. We can’t celebrate it too early, certainly not before Advent, the four-week season of preparation that leads to Christmas Eve. To put up a tree and a nativity scene well before Halloween is to ignore the ancient wisdom that teaches us that Christ comes at an appointed time.
But of course, such an appointment is only clear from this side of the timeline. Christ has been born, and that means something good for our world, no doubt. But that something good can only be made out in reverse, by starting with Jesus and working back through his own faith tradition with help from the Jewish Scriptures that formed him. This, in fact, is what the infancy narratives are up to: offering us imaginative ways to make sense of this baby’s meaning for us by connecting different aspects of his birth—his delivery in Bethlehem, his sojourn in Egypt, the star from Jacob—to Israel’s history with God. But we must be careful not to reduce these narrative details to a category that we uncritically call “prophecy fulfillment.” Jews, to whom these scriptures were first given, don’t believe their texts point to Jesus. That doesn’t mean Christians can’t reread these texts in conversation with Jesus, but we should keep in mind that our interpretations are what C. S. Lewis called “second meanings.” All writers, even biblical ones, say and mean more than they say and mean. And so it makes sense Christians find surplus meaning in texts like “For unto us a child is born.” But again, this meaning only becomes clear after, perhaps long after, the child is born.
It might seem to go without saying, but liturgical calendars are also worked out in reverse, after the celebrated events have played out. Constructed backwards, celebrated forwards. This is one of the tensions inherent in our calendar. The other is that the liturgical calendar prepares us for a future that cannot be prepared for. Our Christian hope is that God will one day step in decisively to disrupt all our timelines. No calendar can prepare us for that day. God will visit us like a thief in the night, like an unanticipated lightning strike, like a laughing spell that overtakes you at the very worst moment. God’s sent out save-the-dates, but where one typically finds information about the exact timing of the party, we find only the words “Keep watch!”
