God's Hope

When we speak about the hope that comes with the celebration of Advent, I suspect that we all think of the hope that we place in God as we wait for the promise of Jesus’ return.  Today’s readings, both the passage we read from Isaiah and the Gospel passage shift our attention to the hope that God has for us. 

Hope is perhaps Advent’s chief characteristic.  Without hope we are lost, our church is lost, and our world is surely lost.  Hope is essentially a sense of confidence in the future, looking forward to better times, to fulfillment.  Hope operates in our lives in so many different ways, some of them in mundane expectations but many of them expectations that make sense of our lives as people of faith.

However, hope is also a virtue displayed by God as well as by God’s creatures.  Isaiah tells us today that God teaches us what is for our good, and leads us on the way we should go.  If we hearken to God’s teaching and the promptings of the Spirit, God assures us that our prosperity would be like a river, and our vindication like the waves of the sea; our descendants would be like the sand, and those born of our stock like its grains, their names never cut off or blotted out from my presence.  These words tell us just how much hope God has for us.

On the flip side of the coin, we hear the words of Jesus in the Gospel through which he takes the crowd to task for their duplicity.  God has sent John the Baptist among them in the hope that they would be led to repentance.  Some regarded John’s behavior as that of a crazy person as he abstained from food and drink.  Yet when Jesus comes among them eating and drinking, they call him a drunkard and a glutton.  God sent John and Jesus as an act of hope in our future.  Yet like so many of God’s gifts, these gifts were squandered by the crowd and only a few placed their faith in the words they preached.

However, those few have made it possible for us to hear the words of both Isaiah and Jesus today in the context of our own dreams of hope for our future, a future that is assured to all who eat the body of Jesus and drink his blood.  The Eucharist is given to us by Jesus in the hopes that he will find us waiting when he returns.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator