Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
December 5, 2025
Advent is a season of hope.
The Eucharistic Preface that the Church prays over the first part of Advent seeks to form us — through remembering Jesus’ first coming in history in Bethlehem and daily coming in mystery in prayer, the sacraments and daily life — to prepare to be even more grounded in the brave hope for his definitive coming.
The Church prays to God the Father: “For [Jesus] assumed at his first coming the lowliness of human flesh and so fulfilled the design you formed long ago and opened for us the way to eternal salvation, that, when he comes again in glory and majesty and all is at last made manifest, we who watch for that day may inherit the great promise in which now we dare to hope.”
The hope that Advent is meant to stoke, in other words, is meant to be daring, not cautious. As we are now preparing to conclude the Jubilee of Hope at the end of the twelve days of Christmas on Jan. 6, it is particularly important for us to understand the boldness that is supposed to flow from our hope.
We sing of that hope in the classic Advent hymn “O Come, Divine Messiah,” as we implore: “O Come, divine Messiah! The world in silence waits the day when hope shall sing its triumph and sadness flee away.”
We likewise pray for it in “O Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus,” whom we call “Israel’s strength and consolation, hope of all the earth thou art.”
On Christmas, in “O Holy Night,” we sing of “a thrill of hope” that leads a weary world to rejoice, and, in “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” we melodically confess “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee (Jesus) tonight.”
Our hope is daring because it is a theological virtue, a moral muscle, that helps us to relate to “Christ Jesus our Hope” (1 Tim 1:1) and makes it possible for us to share, even now, in the “strength and consolation” he gives, in the exhilarating “thrill” of his “triumph,” in his bringing to fulfillment the yearnings “of all the years.”
The Church prays for and with this bold hope at every Mass with the inspired words of St. Paul to St. Titus when, immediately after the Lord’s Prayer, we speak to God the Father about Jesus on the altar and his eventual Advent on the clouds: “As we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ” (Tit 2:3).
Why is our hope daring? Why is Advent supposed to be audacious and Christmas courageous?
It’s because of the nature of hope that the Church has been pondering throughout the Jubilee.
As Pope Benedict XVI suggested in his 2007 encyclical on hope — basing himself on St. Paul’s words to the first Christians in Ephesus that before the Gospel they were “living without hope” because they were “living without God in the world” (Eph 2:12) — the Christian virtue of hope means “living God in the world.”
If we know that Emmanuel, God-with-us, is still with us, whispering to us, “Be not afraid,” when we confront our fears and, “I am with you,” when we face physical, moral or spiritual challenges, our obstacles and anxieties no longer paralyze us because we know that nothing is impossible with God. We believe that, we, too, “can do all things in him who strengthens” us (Phil 4:13). If God the Father has indeed given us his Son — not just 2,000 years ago in his first Advent but every day in the Sacrament of the Altar — then we have a truly grounded hope that he will “give us everything besides” (Rom 8:31-39). So we live boldly, because we live in tandem with him who triumphed even over crucifixion and death.
In the Catechism’s definition of hope, we learn even more about how our hope is meant to be heroic. “Hope,” it describes, is “the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817).
Hope is the “virtue” or “power” that speaks of God and helps us relate to God, and in particular moves us to desire God, his kingdom and eternal life.
It raises our hearts from the small-h hopes of the world — long years, health, human loves, success at school, work, and other endeavors, economic security or wealth, and so many other things, all of which can be fleeting and none of which can ultimately satisfy hearts made to be restless until they rest in God — to seek God and the things that endure.
It helps us to trust in Jesus and stake our life on all that he has promised: 100-fold returns in this life and, through the cross, eternal life (Mk 10:30).
It helps us no longer to be self-reliant, which eventually and often leads to natural and supernatural disappointments, but to be docile to the work of the Holy Spirit within us. The Holy Spirit’s gift of courage helps us to live boldly, even like the martyrs, conscious that not even death can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Even though hope is a gift of God that is meant to make us intrepid, many of us treat it timidly. We regard the theological virtue in practice as an optimistic insurance policy in the event we fail to obtain our this-worldly hopes, as a silver lining for inevitable disappointments. God wants it to be so much more than that.
That’s why, as the culmination of the Jubilee, it’s key for us to live the season of Advent well. To focus on the stoking our desire for the “great hope” of Jesus’ definitive coming and eternal life with God. To learn from the holy impatience of the Jewish people for the Messiah — epitomized by Our Lady before and during her virginal pregnancy and by St. John the Baptist preparing the crowds at the Jordan — how to become an ever bigger Advent candle with all-consuming fire expressing our vigilance for the Lord’s return.
Catholics are meant to be signs and instruments of daring Advent hope for others in the midst of the world.
Like Our Lady and the Baptist, we’re supposed to be Advent personified.
That is what the Jubilee of Hope has been trying to form us to become: those who long for the day of the Lord’s return and for the promised inheritance in which how we daringly hope.