Fourth Sunday of Advent

originally published on December 20, 2020

Today begins the fourth and final week of Advent. On Christmas Eve at sundown or Vespers, we enter into Chrismastime or Christmastide.

In this final stretch before the great feast of the Nativity of the Lord, we should be filled with hope. But what is hope and why should we have it now?

According to the dictionary, hope is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. And, as we approach the season of gift giving, what are we hoping for? Are we hoping that we get what we want for Christmas? Hoping that our favorite team wins this year? Hoping that we’ll get a promotion at work or a year-end bonus?

Not really. While not bad in themselves, these are all examples of the temporal, passing things of Earth and hardly worthy of genuine hope.

Christian hope is far different, far more important, far more lasting. Hope is a supernatural, theological virtue given to us from God that inspires us to live lives of courageous dedication to the values of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the face of uncertainty and difficulty, even persecution, with the ultimate reward being God himself! Hope steers a middle course between despair of salvation on one extreme and presumption of it on the other.

Our hope now in the week before Christmas, is the joyful expectation of the birth of the long-awaited Savior of the world to lift us out of our collective human predicament, that tragic legacy of sin that separates us eternally from God.

Jesus Christ, the God-man, the only Mediator between God and man, is our hope! He it is, Whose birth we await!

That’s hope.