Advent Mailbag

I got a few questions in the holiday season, and here are answers to a couple of them:

Q.       Dear Marvin, why do we light Advent candles, and why are they different colors?

A.        Advent wreaths and candles are a relatively recent invention. A Lutheran pastor in the 19th century who worked with impoverished youth started lighting candles as a way of counting down the days to Christmas. Later, evergreen boughs were added. Deacons who worked in the youth homes introduced the custom into churches. Immigrants brought the custom to the U.S., where it spread beyond the German Lutheran community.

The candle colors—purple, pink, and white—are colors associated with the Christian year. Advent is purple because purple was the royal color in the ancient world, and Advent anticipates the second coming of Christ. The third Sunday of Advent is known as “Gaudete (Latin for joy) Sunday” in some denominations. Its color is pink. The last candle lit on Christmas Eve is white, and white is the color of celebratory seasons like Christmas and Easter.

Q.       Dear Marvin, what is myrrh, and why did the Wise Men bring it to Jesus?

A.        Myrrh is a fragrant ointment made of sap from trees native to Arabia, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Spices are added to the sap to make it smell pleasant. Myrrh was widely used to embalm corpses. That seems like a strange gift to give a baby, but it makes more sense in context. In Matthew’s gospel, no sooner do the Wise Men leave Bethlehem than soldiers dispatched by King Herod swoop into town to kill the baby Jesus, whom Herod fears will grow up to take his crown away. But the Holy Family fled Bethlehem just ahead of the murderous troops. The Christ child came into a dangerous world and would leave the world in a violent way. Historian Martin Connell writes:

Juxtaposed to the sobriety of Matthew’s tale, the “sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying” of (John) Hopkins’s hymn “We Three Kings” is true to the theology of the gospel from which it drew, which, like the hymn’s myrrh, recognizes the element’s “bitter perfume,” that “breathes a life of gathering gloom.”