Hope for Advent: A Reflection

The tradition of lighting Advent candles is one that has become well established in pretty much all our churches over recent years. Each candle symbolises a person or group of people, and also a Christian virtue, so for the First Sunday of Advent, we think about the Patriarchs, but also about hope.

The Patriarchs were the far distant ancestors of the people of Israel, people like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The stories in Genesis tell us that God make them a promise that, despite them being few in number, their descendants would be like the sand on the seashore or the stars in the night sky. And this is a promise that they clung to, a promise that would give them hope, and this hope, this trust that God would keep his promises meant that even at the darkest times, when they were enslaved or oppressed, they looked forward to that fulfilment.

That hope kept them going, and it never died.

God promises were fulfilled, and not in the way they expected, but in the gift of his Son Jesus, those hopes were not only fulfilled, they were completely exceeded as God’s Kingdom broke out on earth, and amazingly is still with us in the Church.

So when we think about hope in Advent, we think about the way in which God fulfilled the hopes of the Patriarchs, but we also look to the renewing of the Church in our own day, always knowing that when we truly place our hopes in God’s hands and keep our focus on his Son Jesus, he will do much more than we could ever imagine and maybe even in ways we were not expecting… and that really is something to hope for this Advent and every day!