Advent means "coming." There are a number of "comings" of which Advent speaks. So what comings are we considering in this season of the church year? Cyril of Jerusalem (d. 386) mentions three of them in the conclusion to his fourteenth Catechetical Lecture.

The coming most Christians are familiar with is the coming of Christ in the manger, born of the virgin Mary. He came in the flesh; flesh like ours. In bearing that flesh He both exalted us, drawing us out of the ditch of death into which we had be flung by the fall of our parents, and became able to sympathize with us in our fleshly weakness (Heb 4:15). Man was joined to God in way that no human could ever have imagined it (Is 64:4). The dismal effects of the fall were completely and fully overcome in the person of God's Son who took our flesh. We have been raised to be brothers with God through sharing flesh with God's Son. He now can suffer for us and truly sympathize with what we go through in our daily, earthly lives; with sorrow, weakness, betrayal, and wickedness fully absorbed and experienced by Him.

The second coming is the coming for which we now wait and for which we hope. On that day our Lord Jesus Christ will come at the blast of the last trumpet and will gather the sheep to Himself and send the goats empty away. He will rescue us from the present evil age because we share with Him his perfect manhood; He cannot disown us for He shares our own flesh. When I was a young man I was accounted the spitting image (what does that phrase mean?) of my dear father. I was a younger clone of my father. We were occasionally mistaken for each other. My father would have been hard pressed to deny that I was his son. We are the children whom the Father has given Him. Christ has taken our image into the image of the invisible God. He cannot deny us, nor would He want to. He has taken our flesh specifically to mark us sons of God with Him. His enfleshment assures us that His return will rescue us from this present evil age.

The third coming is one that must suffice between the first and the second comings; it is the coming of the means of grace. Our Lord Jesus comes among through the humble signs of the preached Word, the holy sacraments of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and the proclamation of holy absolution. Their humility keeps these means in order with the second coming in that there is nothing spectacular like trumpets blowing to herald this coming. They arrive in the manger of our churches and homes without a blaze of glory. Christ comes on the lips of humble preachers when the Word is preached. Christ comes into the trembling hands of communicants, when they kneel in anticipation of precious body given for them. Christ comes to whisper peace upon the ears of penitents; ears berated elsewhere by legalistic demands, but here hearing the peace of God in holy absolution. Christ presents us to the Father in baptism that He might be present with us.