When I think of hope, I think of wishful thoughts and things that are improbable. I think of kids hoping for that Christmas gift their parents can't afford. I think of hope as something like a sports team accomplishing an upset in one of the bowl games. The winning team had hope. They believed what others did not and hoped in a way that defied logic or reasonable expectation. But, Christmas hope is different.
The biblical message of hope is hope in One who made promises about what would become. To hope in the Christmas narrative, is to trust the One who made the promises. Matthew opens with the hopeful expectation of forty-two generations. The people of God had awaited God’s promise of a messiah. The hope of Christmas in Matthew is closer to the modern word trust than the modern word hope. Matthew’s hope/trust was that the one long awaited would be revealed and that God’s love would be fully made known. It was a hope for something that had been promised. The long hoped for promise was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus.
The biblical message of hope is hope in One who made promises about what would become. To hope in the Christmas narrative, is to trust the One who made the promises. Matthew opens with the hopeful expectation of forty-two generations. The people of God had awaited God’s promise of a messiah. The hope of Christmas in Matthew is closer to the modern word trust than the modern word hope. Matthew’s hope/trust was that the one long awaited would be revealed and that God’s love would be fully made known. It was a hope for something that had been promised. The long hoped for promise was fulfilled in the birth of Jesus.
Today, as in the time of Matthew, we live again in a time of hopeful expectation. But, I do not see my hope as something that defies logic or reasonable explanation. As a Christian, I hope/trust that God loves the world and reveals himself in ways that reconcile all of creation to his grace and love. I expect this grace and love because they have been promised as marks of God’s activity in the world. I hope in the promises of God, because I trust the One who has made the promises. The incarnation of love in Jesus confirms my trust in God as now I join Christians in another advent as we await the fulfillment of God’s ultimate promises.
If I trust in these promises and the one who made them, then I am compelled and empowered by this same One to engage in works of mercy in the world. I encourage you to explore how hope/trust whatever you want to call it, leads you to action in the world. As the people of God, we are called to love the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. How are you looking after the widow, orphan, and stranger in your community and world and advocating for them?
As I was reading on hope, I picked up a book on religious philosophy that really had nothing to do with hope. It just caught my eye in as I was going over old books I had not reviewed recently, or so I thought... Edwin Lewis wroteThe Creator and the Adversary in 1929 and as I read it, the hope I had not noticed in my first reading filled the pages of my re-reading of it. Please forgive this long quote, but I found it really helpful in exploring the concept of hope and included it here for your consideration as you reflect on the hope found in the incarnation.
“Nothing that God can ever tell us about himself can change the fact that in our experience, as in the world about us, there is good and there is evil. Revelation—to introduce the word now—does not mean a cheap and easy optimism. Something we come to believe about God, his nature and his purpose, may make a profound difference in our attitude toward the dark and dreadful aspects of our experience, but it will not itself transform these aspects into something which they otherwise are not. To know, not that God creates the evil but hates it, to know that it rises up against him as it does against us, to know that it will yield, if it yield at all, not to a gesture of omnipotence but to the steady persistence of suffering love—to know this is not to change anything in the character of the human situation.
Something, nevertheless, is changed. The approach to the situation is changed. There is a change in the resources available for meeting it. There is a change in the ultimate expectation. If there is a Love that will not let me go, despair and pessimism may be done away. If there is certainty that evil has suffered a fatal blow, incentives to realize the promise in the blow are increased. If God has made clear his own adequacy to the human problem as that is involved in the whole problem of creation itself, then in a personally-felt and personally-maintained relation to such a God will be the secret of victory.” (Edwin Lewis, 21).
The change in the ultimate expectation that unlocks the secret to the victory is what I understand hope to mean. Hope is the awaiting of salvation with joy and full confidence. Hope does not mean that we necessarily get what we want or that the outcomes will be what we hope for. The circumstance may be dire, but hope allows the full resources of God’s triumph over evil to be deployed in the current moment. Hope empowers us into action. Even when that action is to become a part of the steady persistence of suffering love. Christians are literally reshaped by hope to live into the possibilities of God in the now irrespective of the circumstances they confront.
This Christmas I pray that you experience the empowerment of hope.
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