Fifth Sunday of Advent: 2 Timothy 4:9-22, Mark 8:30-34, and John 1:11-18
Paul sits in prison, writing words that ache with abandonment: *Demas, in love with this present world, has deserted me… At my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me.* Feel the weight of that loneliness before rushing past it. This is not incidental biography—this is the pattern of incarnation itself. John’s prologue echoes beneath Paul’s isolation: *He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.* The Word descends into flesh, and flesh recoils. Christ enters the world He made, and the world doesn’t recognize Him. Now Paul participates in that same kenotic descent, and he feels its cost in his bones.
You need to sit with this scandal before anything else makes sense. The Fifth Sunday of Advent—that strange, rare occurrence when the calendar stretches just enough to add one more week of waiting—gives you permission to linger in the tension. Most years we rush from expectation to fulfillment, from prophecy to birth. But this year, there’s an extra Sunday to face what you’ve been avoiding: **incarnation means God choosing the path of radical vulnerability, and if you follow Him, you choose it too.**
When Jesus asks His disciples who He is, Peter confesses: *You are the Christ.* Immediately Jesus commands silence and begins teaching them that *the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected.* Peter’s confession is correct but incomplete—he wants a Christ without a cross, power without descent, glory without the stripping bare that glory requires. Peter rebukes Jesus for this dark teaching, and Jesus responds with words that still sting: *Get behind me, Satan! For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.*
Here’s what you’re avoiding: the part of you that is Peter, the part that wants transformation without descent, healing without facing the wound, resurrection without death. You’ve constructed elaborate spiritualities that bypass the cross—positive thinking that denies legitimate grief, meditation techniques that numb rather than feel, theological systems that explain suffering from a safe distance. But Jesus refuses this escape route. *If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.*
Notice Jesus doesn’t say “take up *my* cross”—He says take up *your* cross. You have your own instrument of descent waiting. It might look like the loneliness Paul describes, everyone deserting you when you most need companionship. It might look like the misunderstanding Jesus faces, your deepest truth rejected by those who should recognize it. It might look like the smallness and obscurity of incarnation itself—infinite Word compressed into vulnerable flesh, omnipotent God becoming a fetus in a teenage girl’s womb.
Maximos the Confessor saw this pattern woven into reality’s fabric: “The Word of God, born once in the flesh (such is His kindness and goodness), is always willing to be born spiritually in those who desire Him. In them He is born as an infant as He fashions Himself in them by means of their virtues. He reveals Himself to the extent that He knows someone is capable of receiving Him” [Philokalia, Vol. 2]. The birth isn’t just historical—it’s perpetual. But like the historical birth, it requires your consent to vulnerability. Mary’s *fiat* wasn’t triumphant—it was terrifying. She said yes to a process that would make her suspect, endanger her engagement, subject her to gossip, and eventually lead to watching her son die.
Paul’s litany of abandonment mirrors this pattern. *Demas… has deserted me; Crescens has gone to Galatia, Titus to Dalmatia. Luke alone is with me.* Feel the specific sting of being named and abandoned. These aren’t abstract crowds—these are people Paul knew, worked with, loved. The incarnation principle works through particular relationships, specific wounds, named betrayals. You can’t bypass this by spiritualizing it into vague “letting go.” No—you have to feel the actual abandonment by actual people, the real loneliness of your particular life.
Yet watch what happens in the naming. *Alexander the coppersmith did me great harm; the Lord will repay him according to his deeds.* Paul doesn’t pretend the harm wasn’t real. He doesn’t perform forgiveness before feeling betrayal. This is crucial: **the descent into incarnation requires brutal honesty about what hurts.** The spirituality that demands you immediately forgive, instantly trust, always see the blessing in disguise—that’s Peter’s rebuke all over again, the demand for resurrection without death.
John’s prologue gives you the cosmic frame for this personal anguish: *The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, yet the world did not know Him.* The Word who spoke galaxies into being enters as a fragile infant. The Light that illumines every person gets snuffed by the darkness it came to penetrate. This isn’t divine masochism—it’s the only way love can work. As Gregory of Nyssa understood, God’s power operates through beauty and attraction, never coercion. “The Divine nature, whatever it may be in itself, surpasses every mental concept. For it is altogether inaccessible to reasoning and conjecture, nor has there been found any human faculty capable of perceiving the incomprehensible” [Against Eunomius].
Since God cannot force recognition—force would destroy the freedom necessary for love—He enters through the vulnerable path. *But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.* Notice: even God must wait for reception. The Word descends, and then… waits. Hopes. Risks rejection. This is the scandal at the heart of Christmas that the Fifth Sunday of Advent forces you to face: **God makes Himself dependent on your response.**
Paul lives this same vulnerability in his prison cell. He’s not directing cosmic events from on high—he’s asking Timothy to *bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments.* The apostle to the Gentiles is cold and needs his coat. The man who planted churches across the Mediterranean wants his reading material. Incarnation means God taking seriously the reality of cold bodies and the need for intellectual companionship and the particular comfort of familiar things.
Your spiritual life has probably tried to transcend this earthiness. You’ve imagined holiness as rising above bodily needs, emotional wounds, the messiness of relationships. But the Fifth Sunday of Advent, stretching out the waiting, invites you to sink more deeply into the incarnational reality. Your body is not an obstacle to overcome—it’s the temple where God chooses to dwell. Your particular wounds are not embarrassing failures—they’re the actual sites where resurrection happens. Your specific loneliness is not evidence of spiritual inadequacy—it’s participation in the kenotic pattern of Christ.
Athanasius grasped how this transforms everything: “The Word was not hedged in by His body, nor did His presence in the body prevent His being present elsewhere as well. When He moved His body He did not cease also to direct the universe by His Mind and might” [On the Incarnation]. The infinite doesn’t abandon infinity to enter the finite—rather, the finite becomes transparent to the infinite. Your limited, wounded, lonely humanity doesn’t limit God’s action—it becomes the specific location where divine power manifests.
This is why Paul can say, in the same breath as cataloging his abandonment: *But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.* Not “despite my abandonment, God was present” but rather “in my abandonment, God was present.” The cross Jesus commands you to take up isn’t punishment—it’s the instrument of descent into the places where you’ve buried your true self. Every wound you’ve denied, every loneliness you’ve spiritualized away, every darkness you’ve covered with false light—these are the locations waiting for incarnation.
The cosmic scope of this becomes visible when you connect personal descent to creation’s structure. *All things were made through Him,* John reminds you. The Word that becomes flesh in Jesus is the same Word woven into matter itself. When you descend into your particular embodiment—feeling your actual feelings, facing your real wounds, accepting your specific limitations—you’re not abandoning the spiritual for the material. You’re discovering that matter itself is God’s self-expression, creation is divine kenosis, and your body is the specific location where the universe becomes conscious of its divine ground.
John Chrysostom saw how this redeems our understanding of weakness: “For if He had come in a form which should strike the beholder with awe, if He had shown Himself in the Divine and ineffable brightness of His glory, how many would have received Him? Would not all have turned aside from Him? Would not all have avoided the sight of Him?” [Homilies on John]. The vulnerability isn’t strategic—it’s revelatory. God’s essential nature operates through kenotic love, and the incarnation simply makes visible what was always true.
So when Jesus tells you to deny yourself, He’s not asking for self-hatred. He’s inviting you to release the false self you’ve constructed to avoid vulnerability—the persona that pretends to need nothing, the mask that hides your wounds, the performance that substitutes for presence. *For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.* The “life” you lose is the defended ego, the controlled image, the self that refuses descent. The life you find is the true self, grounded in the Body of Christ, participating in the divine nature, transparent to the Light that gives light to everyone.
Paul’s request for his cloak becomes a sacramental act when understood this way. He’s not apologizing for having bodily needs—he’s affirming that incarnation is the ongoing method of redemption. The same pattern that brought God into flesh continues as the Church extends incarnation through space and time. When Timothy brings Paul’s cloak, he participates in the mutual vulnerability and care that constitutes the Body of Christ. Your specific acts of kindness to specific people in their particular needs—these aren’t secondary to “real” spiritual work. These *are* the spiritual work, matter becoming transparent to grace.
The Fifth Sunday of Advent gives you one more week to prepare, but preparation doesn’t mean perfecting yourself. It means opening yourself to the vulnerability that Christmas announces. *And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.* The glory shines precisely in the flesh, not despite it. Grace and truth come through the specific human life of Jesus, not around it.
Here’s your invitation as this extended Advent concludes: **Stop trying to engineer spiritual experiences that bypass your actual life.** The loneliness you feel is where Christ is being born, if you’ll consent to it. The abandonment you’ve experienced is the cross you’re invited to take up, not as punishment but as the path of descent into truth. The bodily needs you’ve tried to transcend are the locations where matter becomes eucharist, where your flesh participates in the Word made flesh.
Paul closes his letter: *The Lord be with your spirit. Grace be with you.* Spirit and grace, but mediated through letters and cloaks, through specific relationships and particular needs. He models the integration you’re called to embody—neither escaping into pure spirit nor collapsing into pure materialism, but living the sacramental reality where spirit and matter interpenetrate, where your transformation participates in creation’s transfiguration, where the Word continues to become flesh in you.
This Christmas, when the Word becomes flesh once more in your hearing of the story, let it become flesh in your actual life. Take up your particular cross—the specific wound waiting to be felt, the real loneliness asking to be acknowledged, the vulnerability you’ve defended against. Not because suffering is good, but because descent is the path Jesus walked, and the only resurrection available is on the other side of your personal death. *He came to His own*—which means He comes to you, in your specific circumstances, with all their limitations and possibilities. The question that echoes through these texts is the question that echoes through your life: will you receive Him?
The Greater Horizon 