We’re five days into Advent season, and I can’t stop thinking about hope—and its opposite, hell. (The place, not the expletive.)
Advent, a fasting season established in the fourth century A.D., was designed to prepare our hearts for Christmas in much the same way that Lent can prepare us for Easter. From a Latin word and its related Greek word, “advent” means “coming.” The four weeks before Christmas were originally set aside by the Church to focus on Jesus’ first and second comings. Each of the Advent weeks have a theme, and depending on the particular church tradition, the first week focuses on hope.
With the Christmas season in full swing, many are hoping that its annual cheer will bring some kind of relief to the events of 2020. We hope Christmas will do its thing to us and lift our spirits, even temporarily, from a long and (increasingly) dark period. The more I think about hope—not the object of hope but the act of hoping—the more I’m convinced that hope is what separates life from death.
Hope is what kept people alive in concentration camps, what keeps people fighting for life on a stranded vessel out at sea, what keeps parents loyal to wayward children and keeps pastors ministering to a stubborn congregation and keeps any of us willing to shut off the morning alarm and get up to try again. If we don’t have hope, we don’t have the will to live.
God is described in Scripture as the source of hope (Romans 15:13), and that’s why I think the opposite of hope is hell: if God is not present, hope is not present. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to wake up to an existence where I was guaranteed that nothing would change, where there was no purpose nor promise of any good coming from evil, and where I couldn’t die to escape unending, pointless suffering. These are my darkest imaginings. Hell, a complete separation from God, it is a separation from all hope.
Enter the present: this is the only phase of our existence where hope is a possibility. Enter Advent: the season of longing and hoping for the One being who gives us true reason to hope. Any number of hopes can keep us alive for a while, but hope deferred makes the heart sick, eventually killing us as if hope never existed. And that’s why it means everything to me that Peter’s first letter in the Bible opens by saying that God’s great mercy gave us new birth into a living hope when Jesus resurrected.
Hope is our lifeblood—at Christmas and always. Hope is what I was most thankful for this Thanksgiving season and what I believe is most critical for the human race as we wrap up a tumultuous year.
You probably don’t often read of Advent, hope, and hell in one post, but you also probably didn’t hear of a pandemic, election fraud, and murder hornets in one calendar year before 2020, amiright? In hellish times, hope keeps us afloat. We don’t hope for what we already have: we hope for the redemption of our bodies, for God to work for the good in all that life throws at us, and for an unconquerable love to finally show itself utterly victorious. Hope is a patient waiting.
There are times in Scripture where biblical writers would write about future events in past tense because they were so full of faith: if God spoke it, they already considered it done. I want faith like that. I want more faith in God’s promised hope so that as I recap 2020, I can talk about the coming victories of God as if they’ve already happened.
So this advent season, I challenge you (and me) to hope more. We find ourselves living between the first and second coming of Jesus, giving us the privilege of learning how to hope from centuries of generations who waited for Jesus’ birth. May we hope with passion for the day He comes back. That’s what the hope of Christmas is all about.