Love came down at Christmas. So the poem by Christina Rossetti goes. And so I believe it did. But that’s not all that came down at Christmas. In 2012 Kari Jobe released an album full of Christmas songs including one entitled; “hope came down”. And with love, came hope. But hope is a funny thing. It has the power to see us through the hardest of times, but also the power to tear us apart. Jack Johnson sings in His song called Hope; “It will defeat you then teach you to get back up after it takes away all that you learned to love”. In the film Clockwise, everything is going wrong for Brian, played by John Cleese. Things start to pick up, only for them to get worse again. At one of his lowest points, he declares; “It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.” Even the writer of the book of proverbs in the Bible acknowledges it’s danger, writing; “hope deferred makes the heart sick”.
And that perhaps, is the crux of the matter. The hope that this bad situation is temporary, and that something better is coming can get us through the most difficult of times, but when that what is hoped for doesn’t come it can leave us in a worse state than when we began, perhaps a place of no hope at all. So, I guess the question becomes what is it we are hoping for and who are we hoping in? And perhaps even more importantly, will our hopes come true? The writer of the letter to the Hebrews writes about hope saying; “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”. Our faith in God allows us to be confident that what we hope for is coming, when what we hope for is Him. Jesus came to earth so that we might know God. He also came so that we and the world might be restored to all it was made to be. But that hasn’t happened yet. And yet, little pockets of this restoration of us and our world are happening all the time all around us, even when so much seems to be going wrong. Little promises of the hope that is to come.
One of the Hebrew words for hope is Qavah (קוה). It literally means “to wait” and comes from the Hebrew word for cord. The image is that the expectant waiting of hope is like a cord pulled tight, waiting for its release. We live in that place of tension between what is and what will be, between how things are and how they should be. We wait for something better. But not like we might wait for a bus in bad weather during holiday season not knowing if it will come, but with all certainty that it is on its way and it will come. But our hope is not just for a distant future it is for today too. And so, the questions remains for today, what is it we are hoping for and who are we hoping in? Our hope might be to get a promotion, or a new house, or more visits from the grandchildren, or better health. And these are not bad things to hope for. We might hope in our bosses to recognise our worth, or public transport to be running efficiently, or our spouses to help us feel good about ourselves. And it’s not wrong to look to others for help or to trust them. But if all our hope is tied up in these things, eventually, we will be let down, because this world is uncertain, and life doesn’t always go to plan.
If, however, our hope is not in things going a certain way, but in God ultimately working all things for the good of those who love Him, as Paul promises in his letter to the Romans, then we can be sure that He won’t let us down. Even when things seem impossible, or things don’t go as we’d like. When we learn to trust God’s hope for us is better than our own, we gain a great freedom, but a new tension is found too. The tension between wanting a certain future, and trusting God in bringing to pass a different future if He wills. This is no easy thing. But it is made easier by one more thing. Not only can we trust God with our future, but in the present we have the most precious gift of all, knowing Jesus. And there is no greater guide in the chaos, nor no greater peace in the storm than that which is found in knowing that He is right there with us. Jesus is both the promise of hope for the future and the fulfilment of our hope for today. So truly, in the form of a baby laid in a manger, our hope came down at Christmas.
Originally written for the December 2023 ABC Newsletter
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