Advent Season—Week One: ‘Hope’
The four weeks leading up to Christmas are known in the church calendar as Advent. The word ‘advent’ means ‘arrival’ or ‘coming’ (from the Latin, adventus), and it foreshadows the arrival of Jesus in both his incarnation and his promised return.
Although there are several variations of practice, each of the weeks (the four Sundays) is traditionally focused on a biblical theme: hope, peace, joy, and love. This typically involves lighting candles on an Advent wreath—a purple/violet candle on weeks one, two, and four, and a pink/rose candle on week three, with some traditions adding a fifth white candle on Christmas Eve for Jesus’ birth. This year, the relevant Sundays are 30 November, and 7, 14, and 21 December. In addition to being called the Candle of Hope, the first candle is also sometimes called the Prophecy Candle. This recalls the Old Testament prophetic references to the birth of the Messiah that inform the Christmas readings.
The first week’s theme—of hope—is a strange one. We tend to use it in an optimistic yet rather throwaway “hope for the best” kind of way. When people say, “I suppose there’s always hope”, it’s often in a context where they think that, actually, there is no hope. Hoping for something can mean unrealistic dreaming or wishful thinking that’s not grounded in reality. Hope is not another way of saying Things Can Only Get Better, the 1990s song by D:Ream—co-opted by the Labour Party, against the writers’ wishes!—not least because it’s too often been proven to be untrue.
In contrast, biblically speaking, hope is a positive concept that is centred on the promises of God, the faithfulness of God, and the unchanging nature and character of God. The idea of hope as reflecting an uncertain, ungrounded optimism comes from its Greek meaning, not its biblical meaning.
The Old Testament Hebrew word, yāḥal, carries the sense of both ‘hope’ and ‘waiting’. The KJV translates it ‘hope’ 22 times and ‘wait’ 12 times. It reflects a patient expectation and, hence, a waiting and trusting in God.
That’s a key point—as with the notion of faith, our hope is not in hope, but in God. Hope and trust are parallels—both are centred in God and hence carry the implication of patiently waiting.
The word reflects these related meanings several times in the book of Job. For example, Job’s well-known saying in Job 13:15 is variously translated “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (NIV) and “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him” (NKJV). The EHV has “Even if he slays me, I will wait for him with hope.”
The Vineyard worship song, Unfailing Love, begins: “We wait in hope for you, Our shelter and our truth, You are always faithful to your word.” The song echoes the Psalms: “We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our help and our shield (Psalm 33:20) and “I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope” (Psalm 130:5).
A key aspect of biblical hope is that it’s not just a passive sitting and waiting. Hope inspires us to act in the present, in the light of God’s coming future. Just as Jesus’ actions were prophetically signposting a world as it will one day be—the ‘first fruits’ of the full harvest to come, a final consummation, or divine intervention, that we call ‘new creation’—so, too, we are called to replicate his actions as his followers.
We misunderstand hope if we think of it only as something that we ‘have’. Hope is not just a noun representing a commodity; it is (or should also be) a verb—something that we do. We should be bringers of hope; deliverers of hope. Just as God promised to bless Abraham in Genesis 12 so that he in turn might be a blessing, so, too, for us concerning hope. We receive hope, and we bring hope.
One of the pernicious aspects of feeling a sense of hopelessness is the damage that it does to people’s lives—physically, emotionally, mentally—that we need to come against in Jesus’ name.
When Jesus spoke of the thief coming only to steal, kill, and destroy life in people (John 10:10), I don’t think he meant only Satan (which is usually assumed, from the personification). I think he meant all of the ‘enemies’ of human life and human thriving (personified or otherwise), including sin, sickness, poverty, injustice, abuse, hopelessness, distress, and oppression. We are called to join in with Jesus’ alternative agenda in the second part of the verse: to be bringers of life—of a ‘more abundant’ quality of life, that Jesus wants for every person—aligning ourselves with his John 10:10 mission, wherever we see the need and the opportunity. We ought not to ‘spiritualise’ away Jesus’ life-enhancing agenda; it’s not just about personal soul care, as was clear from Jesus’ holistic ministry.
This first week of Advent, perhaps we might ask ourselves, “How might I rediscover my hope in God? To reawaken that hope in my own life, and then be a bringer of hope into other people’s lives on Jesus’ behalf? What might delivering that hope look like in practice, for whom? When, where, and how might I do that? How can I act in Jesus’ name against the enemies of human life and thriving in the people I know, and bring, in its place, more life in abundance?”
Remember that nothing we do is too small or insignificant—as Jesus said in Matt 10:42, “If you give even a cup of cold water to one of the least of my followers, you will surely be rewarded.”
Photo by KaLisa Veer on Unsplash