For Christians, Advent is the season of expectation and hope. We are all busy doing stuff to get ready for Christmas. We are hanging Christmas decorations, setting up the tree, baking cookies, buying presents, fighting traffic, and shoveling a lot of snow!
What are we hoping for this Advent? When it’s all over, when Christmas is done, what was it all about? What are we expecting this year? Perhaps we need to go deeper into Advent hope and expand our horizon of hope . . . and get in touch with the big picture.
The Bible is a history of expectation. Because God is in charge of history, human history is heading somewhere. History is more than fate, contingency, and disjointed events. The Bible is “salvation history.” It is history interpreted from the perspective of God’s overall plan. Jews and Christians are rooted in this history, rooted in the biblical view of history. It is the acute awareness of God within history that characterizes Judaism and Christianity. This history is a history of expectation: God’s future is always on the way!
The biblical vision gradually broadens from the particular to the universal, from Israel to “the nations,” and from the mundane and temporal to the cosmic and eternal. We move from the original creation to “the new creation.” We move from a literal Jewish messiah to a cosmic Christ, a universal redeemer. In the Bible we can find narrow-minded Jewish nationalism and narrow-minded Christian sectarianism. But the thrust of the Bible as a whole is toward the cosmic, the eternal, and the universal. God wants to save the world and all creation, not only Jews and Christians!
In other words, hope keeps expanding as the horizon of salvation keeps expanding. Expectation increases, since no historical moment can contain or exhaust the fullness of God. History itself is moving toward that fullness: the kingdom of God.
Advent hope is broad, expansive, and inclusive. It goes beyond “my family” or “my church” or “my kind of people.” Advent hope goes beyond partisanship and sectarianism; it goes beyond “group think” or “us versus them.”
When it’s all over and Christmas is done, will our hope be larger? Will our vision of salvation be broader? Will we have expanded our compassion beyond our own kind to those who differ most from us? The Savior that was born in Bethlehem has a lot more on his mind than my presents, my house, my church, my country, or my kind of people.
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