Third Sunday of Advent: Advent Hope

Last week we heard John the Baptist speaking boldly about the one who was to come after him, one who would “baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.” Like all the Jewish people, John longed for the day when God would send the Anointed One, the Messiah, to bring a new order and a better life for His people—whether that meant, as it did for some, freeing them from control of a foreign nation, or as it did for others, that the hearts of the people themselves would be free.

John and his fellow Jews would have known all that had been foretold about the Chosen One, the Messiah, the Anointed One who was to come. Isaiah himself had said that when he comes, “the deaf shall hear….out of gloom and darkness, the eyes of the blind shall see” (26:19)….”the lame shall leap like a stag, and the mute tongue sing for joy” (35:6)….the lowly will find joy and the poor will rejoice in the Holy One of Israel (29:19).

I want to suggest that we can’t properly appreciate Advent, if we don’t have some understanding of what the Jewish people were hoping and waiting for…wishing that God would at last send the One who would be fulfillment of that promise. John the Baptist had clearly seen something in Jesus that compelled him to declare, as we heard last week, “He’s the one! Make your hearts ready”. That was from chapter 3 of St. Matthew’s Gospel.

Here we are, a week later, eight long chapters later, when at last John the Baptist again shows up in the narrative. But things are very different for John and he absolutely sounds different. No longer the booming voice in the wilderness, he now ponders quietly from the confines of a prison cell. With nothing but time and solitude, he waited, and it seems that he wondered: Is Jesus really the one who is to come? Is this really the long-expected messiah? John sent messengers to Jesus to ask. Jesus responded to the messengers: Tell John that all those things Isaiah said would happen, are happening…through me.

Here we are so many years later, and indeed the Chosen One for whom the Jewish people longed, indeed came. We’ll celebrate the anniversary of his coming, a little more than a week from now. Still, maybe we struggle with our own doubts: If Jesus is the fulfillment of what Isaiah said would come, why are things like they are? Why are people starving? Why is life so hard for some? Why is there war, sickness and death? Why am I lonely? Why do I experience struggles in life?

Our Catechism addresses this nagging question, saying: “By freeing some individuals from the earthly evils of hunger, injustice, illness and death, Jesus performed messianic signs. Nevertheless, he did not come to abolish all evils here below, but to free men (and women) from the gravest slavery, sin, which thwarts them in their vocation as God's sons and causes all forms of human bondage” (CCC, 549).

All the troubling realities around us and within us, it says, are the by-product of sin. It gives way to doubt and kills our capacity for hope. You perhaps know that there are three virtues that we call ‘theological virtues’, meaning that they are not attained by mere reason, but instead by grace: faith, hope and love. For us as Christians, hope is the understanding that God has something more in store for us, beyond here and now.

We might think that hope is just another word for optimism. It’s different. Optimism looks at the difficulties in this life and in our world and says that ‘things will work out’ or ‘all will be well’. But Christian hope, according to the world’s optimism would regard us more properly as pessimists. Why? Because we know and accept that we and all things in this life will come to an end; that there will be difficulties in life; that as good as this life can be, it will never entirely satisfy the longing of our hearts.

The virtue of hope projects further out. Hope isn’t naïve and doesn’t ignore the fact that there is suffering and evil in the world, but instead it allows us to see beyond these realities, something that only the vision of faith can see.

So, in our waiting and waiting, perhaps feeling sometimes like John the Baptist in his prison cell, how do we avoid the gradual creep of doubt? How do we nurture the gift and grace of hope? First, by recalling again and again, the figures of our past, who saw promises fulfilled after much waiting and cause for doubt: Abraham, Moses, Joseph and Mary. As God did for them, so he will for us who wait.

But secondly, we nurture hope by being a living sign of it for others: doing the things Isaiah foretold and Jesus did: healing the sick, comforting the afflicted, feeding the hungry. We combat these effects of sin, knowing that we will never completely eradicate them. Yet Advent hope keeps our vision fixed beyond them, looking toward Zion on high, where lies the fulfillment of promise for which our hearts long.