In the preparation and waiting of Advent, both the waiting associated with the Incarnation and Christmas and the preparation for the Second Coming, one of the questions that arises is: how do you prepare? How is anticipation channeled? In the passage for the Second Sunday of Advent from Paul’s letter to the Philippians, the waiting is given a practical spiritual focus, in one of my favorite Pauline passages. The conjunction between love on the one hand and knowledge and insight on the other hand juxtaposes what we often separate:

“And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what is best, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God” (Philippians 1:9-11)

We are asked to allow our love to “overflow more and more,” but whereas our culture often sees love as strictly emotive, feelings untethered from responsibility or reason, Paul asks that our love overflow “with knowledge and full insight to help you determine what is best.” Love should be driven by spiritual virtues, not untethered from them, and this is of value not only for the others to whom our love is directed, but for ourselves. Our task is to “be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.” Paul is descriptive in this passage, not exactly prescriptive, and note the stress he puts on love coupled with insight as a means “to help you to determine what is best.” Our preparation, our anticipation is largely in our hands, but Paul seems to be suggesting that we can neither have Love without Truth or Truth without Love. It seems that this path, working out our own salvation “with fear and trembling” as Paul writes elsewhere in Philippians (2:12), ought to be enough to keep us active as we prepare and wait.

John W. Martens

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.