True meaning of Advent
IllustrationAnalogy★★★★For large numbers of people the advent story has lost its meaning. A photographer had been sent to the school of San Rocco in Italy to get pictures of the wonderful Tintoretto murals of the Nativity. He tried to photograph these exquisite paintings in their natural color, but failed.
He used every conceivable kind of light, but was not successful. The colors would not come true and clear. Careful examination revealed that these wonderful murals of Christ’s Nativity had been overlaid with four centuries of varnish, dirt, and dust. The radiant beauty of the original colors did not shine through.
At last the photographer tried polarized light, and then the authentic colors were caught by his camera. What a perfect parable this is for the real meaning of Christmas, or the advent story. For centuries it has been overlaid with traditional varnish, with commercial dust and dirt, until it has become only a sweet story of a baby in a manger, for whom we may be moved with pity; or the occasion of organized, commercialized, vulgar carnival and celebration, so that millions today fail to see the glorious, wonderful, majestic, and eternal fact of the Emmanuel, God with us.
The point
Like Tintoretto's nativity obscured by centuries of varnish and dirt, Christ's incarnation (Emmanuel—God with us) has been buried under commercial and sentimental layers.