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Dietrich Bonhoeffer once compared the meaning of Advent to life in a prison cell. “One waits, hopes, and does this, that or the other,” but “the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside.”1

For those of us living in the already-but-not-yet, Advent is about more than looking back to Israel’s story for insight into Christ’s birth. It’s our opportunity to enter that story, to reflect on our experience for a clearer sense of our need for redemption. Only with a clear-eyed view of darkness—of sin and sorrow and loss—will our hearts perceive the beauty in his coming and long for the day of his return. Where have you tasted your need for Jesus this year?

Fits the Season

A few months ago I reread F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with a group of friends. We’d all read it before under duress. But we wanted a fresh look before the latest film adaptation hit theaters this summer. Granted, Gatsby is a far cry from an Advent devotional. But in a way it fits the season. It’s had me thinking a lot about the passage of time, about the relentless approach of death, and about the effect of these realities on the joys we can know in this life.

The novel follows Jay Gatsby’s pursuit of what Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, calls the “orgastic future” (189).In a sense Gatsby embodies the promise of the Western frontier—given freedom and opportunity, anyone can make for himself a future that rises above the circumstances of his past. By reputation, the book is a riff on the American Dream. This was certainly my impression the first time through, and it’s not completely off the mark.

But there’s a perceptive nuance to Fitzgerald’s account of the quintessentially American self-made man. The driving energy of this story is nostalgic to its core. Gatsby’s dream—the essence of his “orgastic future”—hinges on the recovery of what he had loved and lost. Chances are if you know anything about this story you know it centers on Gatsby’s pursuit of Daisy Buchanan. The two were sweethearts when Gatsby had nothing but an army uniform. But while he fought the Great War in Europe, Daisy—unable to wait for him—married an old-monied, polo-playing football star from Yale. True, Gatsby is the poster child for Prohibition Era opulence. But his pursuit of wealth and all its attendants—the otherworldly mansion, the fancy cars, the wild parties—is always aimed at winning Daisy back. His greatest desire for the future is to repeat his past. His chief arrogance is that he believes he can do it.

Time Marches On

The great adversary to Gatsby’s ambition is not Daisy’s husband. It’s not the seedy connections through whom he makes his money. It’s not the impoverished anonymity of his upbringing or the ill-formed sensibilities his excessive spending can’t hide. His great adversary is time. By one count Fitzgerald uses 450 words related to time throughout the story.Gatsby’s “orgastic future” is the full enjoyment of what he’d once known only briefly and in part. But time always and only marches on. That’s why Carraway describes Gatsby’s imagined future as one that “year by year recedes from us.”

Surely Isaac Watts had it right: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.” Just as surely, Fitzgerald captures all of us as those who “beat on, boats against the current” (189). The lasting resonance of The Great Gatsby stems from this insight into our basic human longing. Few of us will ever experience anything like the decadent luxuries of the roaring twenties. But all of us know what it is to struggle against the corrosive effects of time—to preserve, protect, or restore what we love. And we know from experience what Gatsby illustrates so well: ours is a fruitless struggle. The passage of time renders the best of joys unsatisfying and incomplete. Even in the moment our joy is weighed down by the sense that the things we love don’t last.

Only the Henchman

I’ve said Gatsby’s chief adversary is time, but that’s not precisely true. Time is only the henchman of what the apostle Paul calls our great and final enemy (1 Cor. 15:26). Gatsby looks to Daisy for deliverance from what he fears most—a monotonous everyman’s existence followed by the nothingness of death. But the same current that carries Gatsby further and further from his imagined future carries him—carries us—to the grave. It is the knowledge of our inevitable mortality, that life itself is only a breath, which gives apocalyptic significance to our experience of loss, regret, or disappointment.

To state the matter positively, written into every experience of transitory joy and irretrievable loss is a yearning for eternal life. And precisely in light of this longing, the gospel’s promises of redemption and resurrection come to life. Only when we acknowledge the inescapable tyranny of death can we celebrate the glory of one born to set his people free.

Foretaste of Joy

The light of Christ transforms what we’ve known as irretrievable loss into a mere foretaste of far greater joys to come. If death is final, then the loss of what we’ve loved in this life is final too. There’s just nothing for it. But if Jesus lives, then death is defeated. If Jesus lives, the fleeting pleasures of this world are ours to enjoy with open hearts but also open hands, an aperitif en route to glory. The transitory objects of our love are not a sign that all is lost. They’re a sign that we’re made for more than what this world can offer.

Reading Gatsby this time through I couldn’t help but think of that passage in The Weight of Glory where C. S. Lewis reflects on the power and place of nostalgia. For Lewis, nostalgia is one of the names we give to the instinctive desire for “our own far-off country.” He writes, “If a transtemporal, transfinite good is our real destiny, then any other good on which our desire fixes must be in some degree fallacious.”Trapped in time, the things we love if loved too much “turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers.” What joy we know in them always turns to longing for what is past. But the coming of Christ reorients our longing for a full measure of the beauty we’ve tasted in this in-between age. Those good things time carries away we recognize as “only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”5

The Advent season calls us to savor the sweet promises of the gospel by looking to Christ through our longing for something more. The promises are true. Come, Lord Jesus.


Letter to Eberhard Bethge, November 21, 1943, in God is in the Manger: Reflections on Advent and Christmas, ed. Jana Reiss (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 13.

2 This and all subsequent citations are from F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, with notes and a preface by Matthew J. Bruccoli (1925; repr., New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995).

Ruth Prigozy, “Introduction,” in The Great Gatsby (1925; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xxxi.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (1949; repr., New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 29.

Ibid., 31.

 

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