Hope That God Will Prevail

Second Sunday of Advent

In your life right now, where do you feel most limited? Maybe it’s your health: a chronic illness, or a sudden, terrifying diagnosis. Maybe your job is on the line. Perhaps your insurance premiums are going to rise in the New Year. Maybe it’s a particular relationship: an old friendship has come to an end, or a marriage is nearly stretched to its breaking point. Maybe it’s your self-awareness: finally admitting the grip of a deep addiction, or realizing that a self-focused attitude has alienated family for decades. Perhaps you are worried about your children or your grandchildren. The list of human limitations is as long as our collective arms.

Next, consider where in your life you see your greatest reason for hope; that strength or blessing you could leverage as a resource to overcome despair. Would your reason for hope be strong enough to overcome the impact of your limitations?

We will never be adequately prepared for the coming of the Savior unless and until we feel in our bones that there is something from which we need to be saved. If we don’t require salvation, then Jesus devolves, very quickly, into one wise man among many, one more spiritual teacher in a long line of similar figures across space and time. The great and ancient Advent chant, “O come, O come, him Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel,” catches this fundamental Christian truth. Until we feel like prisoners held for ransom, men and women condemned to hopeless exile, we will not sing those words with anything even approaching conviction.

The passage from the sixty-third chapter of the prophet Isaiah provides a series of images that help us to articulate this sense of being in desperate need of salvation. “Why,” Isaiah laments, “do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways?” Indeed, many have lost their way and have left the path that Jesus has given us, that we are meant to walk; in fact, Jesus tells us that He Is the Way. Dante’s Divine Comedy commences with these lines: “Midway on the journey of life, I woke to find myself alone and lost in a dark wood, having wandered from the straight path.”

What if you were told that your greatest hope exists not despite your limits, but because of them — that the reason for your hope (cf. 1 Pt 3:15) can emerge from your failings, insecurities or defeats? As ludicrous as that sounds from within popular culture, it lies at the core of the Christian worldview.

“A shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse” (Is 11:1). This line from the first reading is arguably one of the most important in the entire Bible. The “stump” referred to is the seemingly lifeless remnant of the Kingdom of Israel. Jesse was the father of boy who would become King David. Jesse was the son of Obed and the grandson of Ruth and of Boaz. He lived in Bethlehem, in Judah, and was of the Tribe of Judah, he was a farmer, breeder and owner of sheep. He was a prominent resident of the town of Bethlehem. He had eight sons, the youngest of whom was David who went on to become the greatest of the Kings of Israel. Therefore, the Davidic dynasty came from Jesse. However, the dynasty seems to have died with the Assyrian or Babylonian attack on Israel. The great city of Jerusalem had been sacked by the Babylonian empire and the Temple had been destroyed. Many of Israel’s most prominent citizens had been taken to Babylon into exile, and there was no prospect of their ever returning. It must have appeared that their religion, and hence their identity, was a fading ember. Yet, in the face of that hopelessly bleak prospect, the prophet Isaiah proclaims the promise from the Lord that new life will spring from this lifeless stump. And so it does, but not in the way that Israel had hoped.

The Persian ruler Cyrus would defeat Babylon and allow the Israelites to return home, but the kingdom they had once gloried in would never achieve its former degree of independence or luster. The shoot would grow very slowly, but it would never blossom as before.

Even when Jesus arrives — the king whose triumph we celebrated two weeks ago — there is little to suggest greatness: born of a simple couple from a small town in Galilee; mocked, rejected and killed by the very people who were most waiting for the shoot to flourish. It would indeed flourish, in a way that no one could have predicted. For its victory had to come through Jesus’ vulnerability and radical self-gift of himself. That required an equally radical acceptance of his heavenly Father’s love.

We may well ask: Why did it have to be that way? Why the slow, tortuous path through history, longing and waiting for the small shoot to grow? Why didn’t the Lord just plant a new, towering tree by establishing a new dynasty? When it comes to the ways of the Lord, asking “Why did it have to be that way?” is rarely fruitful. God could have chosen any way. Perhaps the better question is: “Since God chose to do it this way, why is that the most helpful way for us?”

Jesus’ human vulnerability, just like yours and mine, brought him to an important crossroad: either rely on the Father for everything, trusting in his guidance, or resist his limitations, seeking a self-focused power, the original sin of Adam. We know the choice Jesus made, and the result of that choice. That’s an important point to remember. Jesus made a choice. God didn’t force him to die on a cross Therefore, we too should be confident that the same dynamic is offered to us, who are like him “in all things but sin.”

So how can we find hope emerging through the midst of our limitations, fears or sufferings? It’s not an easy or quick journey to be sure. But to the degree that we can allow our vulnerabilities to become the pathway for trustfully reaching out to others and to God, accepting their love, we can undergo the transformation that such love accomplishes.

The love of God is not a consolation prize, it is all he has to offer, and it is ultimately a source of peace. The shoot of hope will grow out of the holes in our hearts, and it will be fertilized by our trust. Place your hope in God and God’s plan to deliver you from weakness and infirmity. As St. Paul writes to the Romans and to us today, “May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to think in harmony with one another, in keeping with Christ Jesus, that with one accord you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” As he wrote earlier in this letter, “Hope does not disappoint,” because true hope is grounded in our faith in the love of God and the assurances that God does not make empty promises. God will prevail.