The Good News Before the Good News
Why Advent Reveals God’s Victory Long Before the Resurrection
I’ve been reflecting on Advent and on why the Church asks us to wait when everything in us wants to just rush ahead to celebration. Let’s crank the Christmas music and just have the party now. Yet it feels like the tradition is to light candles in the dark, retell old prophecies, and sit with a longing feeling. For me at times, it feels impractical since we already know how the story ends.
When I converted to Catholicism I thought of Advent as a spiritual countdown to Christmas. Something we walk through solemnly on the way to joy. But that didn’t quite felt right. Advent didn’t just feel like simple anticipation, it felt like tension. Like living between promise and fulfillment, trusting God has spoken while the world still looks unfinished.
That tension seems to sit at the heart of the Christian life.
We know the Resurrection to be the final victory, not only over physical death, but over separation from God itself. When Christ rises, the lie that we are abandoned or cut off is finally undone.
The story wonderfully shows that death does not win and our distance does not last. But I think that victory does not begin at Easter, but much earlier. It begins at the Incarnation.
The birth of Jesus is already an act against death and separation. Before Christ defeats death, He enters it. Before He conquers suffering, He chooses vulnerability. God does not wait for the world to be ready, He comes into it as it is.
This is the good news before the Good News.
Advent reminds us that God’s presence does not depend on clarity or resolution. Hope does not wait for things to make sense. Long before angels sing or tombs are emptied, God is already near, already moving, already refusing to stay distant. God always is.
Waiting, then, is not the absence of hope but often the form hope takes. Israel waited centuries for the Messiah, often confused and disappointed, yet something was quietly unfolding beneath the surface. The Word was moving toward flesh and salvation was taking shape in hidden ways.
Advent then trains us to live the same way. To trust God while life still feels unfinished and hope before any outcomes are clear. We then get to believe that presence matters more than control. Which for me has always been the hardest of concepts to accept.
If the Resurrection reveals that death and separation are not ultimate realities, then the Incarnation tells us they were never God’s intention in the first place. God does not rescue the world from a distance, but He enters it from the inside.
It is right from the stable that we get the announcement before what the empty tomb will later confirm, that God is with us, and He is not leaving.
That is the hope Christ gives the world. Not that life will be easy or orderly, but that no darkness is godless, no waiting is wasted, and no moment is beyond redemption.
Advent teaches us how to live before everything makes sense, because the victory over death begins not with power or spectacle, but with a child born in the dark. And that is where our hope begins.
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