The Christian Hope

             With the season of Advent we begin the new liturgical year, focusing on the mystery of our redemption, foreshadowed in the daily scriptural readings of Old Testament figures, kings, prophets, and holy men and women, each one clarifying some aspect of the messianic promise: a means of preparing us for the coming of the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah, the Word made flesh. In this short period before Christmas the Church reinterprets for us the long ages which preceded the birth of Jesus. The Chosen People symbolize humanity’s struggle during the vicissitudes of life - enjoying brief periods of prosperity and then encountering sharp reversals of fortune, emphasizing the need for dependence on God for mercy and rescue. The Book of Psalms treats this eloquently in its appeals for God’s succor and in its praise and thanksgiving for deliverance through His intervention. This faith and hope in God as Providential Father is much like our own recognition of His concern for us, with this difference: that our redemption has become a fact through the birth and death of Jesus, with the proclamation of the Gospel reaching beyond the Chosen People to include all mankind. The Kingdom of Promise, too, is a spiritual reality, not to be mistaken for a temporal, this worldly and perishable kingdom. The destruction of the Temple, the glory and wonder of its time, forced the Jews to give up the primitive ritual of animal sacrifice in their form of worship, with the emphasis placed on purification of heart and soul, thereby worshiping God in spirit and in truth, which the prophets urged and which Jesus taught to the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel.

              The Christian hope, however, differed radically from the expectation of the ancient world, both pagan and Jewish. Their messianic, golden age of the future was a utopian dream world in which war and hunger, toil and poverty, death and disease, had no place. Even the creatures of nature would be at peace, wolves and lambs lying down together, lions eating hay rather than devouring other animals, and an absence of natural and man-made disasters. The Pax Christi would replace the peace imposed by the imperial armies of Caesar. (Rome made a desert and called it peace.) The early Christians believed that the realization of this peace was at hand, since they expected that Jesus’ return would happen in their own time; hence, the urgency of conversion and the necessity of preparedness, since he would come as a thief in the night. Gradually, when the parousia did not take place, the people realized that they were making the same mistake as the pagans and the Jews, who looked for a kingdom in the present order, one that was tangible, visible, readily comprehensible and attainable. They now understood that the power and glory belonged to a spiritual, not a temporal, kingdom.

              Advent is the season of hope, and this should be the virtue on which our attention must be fixed. In what does this hope consist for each one of us; how do we go about deepening it in us and realizing it; As a grace, it is a gift wholly dependent on God’s will. But the preparation for its reception is up to us. Effort, disposition, inclination - all are required if we are to benefit from this annual coming of Jesus into our lives in a special way, so that we are renewed, restored and reborn in Him when his birth in Bethlehem is symbolically reenacted.


(This text is collected from one of Fr. Damian's reflections)