Hope is a necessary thing, but it is also a dangerous thing. Dictators attempt to quash it due to its potential for inspiring activism against their cruel control.
But you don’t have to be under a cruel regime to require hope and to feel hopeless. In the western, wealthy world today there exists the stench of hopelessness, an air of frustration with how things are, and anxiety about the future.
The reality of hope requires at least two subversive ideas. First, that things are not as they should be. Second, that there is a way out. Most people believe the first. Many scoff at the second.
The Advent season that leads into Christmas taps into this very ancient longing, this aching for someone or something to come and bring the change we long for. And what Christmas declares is that ‘Hope Came Down’. Christmas proposes that the answer we need came from outside of us and our material world, and came in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.