December 2, 2020
For in hope we were saved… - Romans 8:24
Light the first candle – the candle of hope.
There is a scene near the end of Return of the King, the third in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Ring series. Samwise Gamgee, the traveling companion, friend, and person charged with taking care of Frodo Baggins, encounters the great wizard, Gandalf. Gandalf, who had though Samwise dead, asks a simple, yet profound question: “Is everything sad going to come untrue?”
Within this question, we find one of the main messages of Advent. We have a real, tangible hope, and we long for the coming of our King who will come and make all things new. Pain, confusion, sadness, even sickness and this pandemic – all things will be made new.
We do not take this great hope as a way to undervalue the life that we have now, but is can help us to have a greater context. Our hopes and expectations anchor us in a greater reality that is both transforming and transcending. Current pain or hardship doesn’t become less real, or less important; rather, because of the great hope we have in Christ it becomes finite, whereas eternity is infinite. We know that no matter what we face in this world, it will at some point “come untrue.”
Paul anchors the believers in the church of Rome in this certainty of hope. They are called to wait for the King who will make good on His primes. The end of the current age will come, everything sad will come untrue, but until then, we must trust in God and wait with great hope.
Advent has the potential to create in us a transforming anticipation because of the hope it offers for something better. Because Jesus came, we can walk through the difficulty of life with a very real hope. A hope that Christ will come again. A hope that one day, we will no longer have a need for hope because on that day we will stand face-to-face with the One in whom we have placed our hope.
May we seek the hope of Christ’s coming as the child of heaven, as the savior of our souls, as the King who will return to us one day.
Grace & Peace,
Sam