In Nativitate Domini - Christ our Hope

PRESENTATION: The Jubilee of Hope

With the formal opening of the Holy Door in Rome last evening, we have now officially begun the Ordinary Jubilee Year, which will continue until the Epiphany of Our Lord in 2026. The tradition of a Jubilee is scriptural in origin, going back to the Book of Leviticus, which mentions a special year of remission of sins, debts and universal pardon.

A Jubilee is mentioned to occur every 50th year, during which slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven, and the mercies of God would be particularly manifest. The tradition of Jubilee in the Church goes back to 1300 when Pope Boniface VIII convoked a holy year. A preparatory document for Jubilee 2000 described a Jubilee Year this way:

In the Roman Catholic tradition, a Holy Year, or Jubilee is a great religious event. It is a year of forgiveness of sins and also the punishment due to sin, it is a year of reconciliation between adversaries, of conversion and receiving the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and consequently of solidarity, hope, justice, commitment to serve God with joy and in peace with our brothers and sisters. A Jubilee year is above all the year of Christ, who brings life and grace to humanity.

The theme for this year of Jubilee is the theological virtue of Hope, which is particularly suitable for our reflection on this opening day of the Jubilee Year, the Feast of the Birth of Our Lord, which is, after all, a Day of Hope. The child in the manger is the reason for and the source of all our Hope.

Hope is often described as the forgotten virtue, sandwiched between Faith and Charity on the list of virtues; we tend to focus on and better understand those other two and the four Cardinal Virtues more than we do Hope. Hopefully (no pun intended), this year will help us to reclaim the virtue all the more in our spiritual lives.

What is the Virtue of Hope? The Catechism tells us:

Catechism of the Catholic Church (U.S. Edition with Glossary and Index) Hope

Hope 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.

German Catholic Philosopher Josef Pieper gave a more all-encompassing definition, saying, “[H]ope is a steadfast turning toward the true fulfillment of man’s nature, that is, toward good, only when it has its source in the reality of grace in man and is directed toward supernatural happiness in God.

All of these definitions are rather abstract, which is perhaps why we tend to focus less on Hope than the other virtues. After all, Faith is rooted in the Person of God, and Charity is directed to God and our neighbour. Hope just seems less personal, but this beautiful Feast of Christmas can help us remedy that.

Echoing the words of St. John’s Prologue, the Gospel read at the end of every Mass, and the Gospel for the Mass of Christmas Day, St. Thomas Aquinas tells us, “Christ has entered for us into the inner sanctuary of the tent and has there made firm our hope.” So, Hope is very personal because our Hope is Christ.

EXPLANATION: In the Arms of Jesus

In the year 1623, at the beginning of Lent, the Venerable Agnes of Jesus became very ill. She was at that time only twenty-one years old. The physicians who were called in did not seem to understand the nature of her malady and gave her medicine, which, instead of making her better, only made her suffer all the more.

But Agnes never uttered one word of complaint; the only words she said were the following, which she repeated often every day: “O my God, O my sweet and amiable Jesus, mayest Thou be blessed a thousand and a thousand times.”

When Easter Sunday came, God was pleased to reward the patience with which she had suffered the heavy crosses He had been pleased to send her by permitting her angel guardian to appear to her.

“My child,” said the angel, “are you happy in your sufferings?”

“Yes,” she answered, “because it is the holy will of Him Whom I love with all my heart.”

“But was it not also your own desire to suffer? He has only done to you what you yourself asked Him to do.”

Agnes answered: “My heart and my will are entirely united to Him; let Him dispose of me according to His Divine will; and if it should be His desire that I should suffer all my lifetime, and even to the Day of Judgement, I am ready to do so.”

The angel answered: “Continue to love Jesus in this way, and be assured that He will never forsake you.”

Our Hope is not meant to be grounded in abstract concepts or on some vision of future reward; our Hope is Jesus Christ.

IMPLICATION: The Vitality of Hope

St. Augustine, in a sermon on the Epistle to the Romans, reminds us, “But Paul did not say, ‘we shall be saved,’ but ‘we have already been saved’; yet not in fact, but in hope; he says, ‘in hope were we saved.’… This hope we have in Christ, for in him is fulfilled all that we hope for by his promise… As yet we do no see that for which we hope. But we are the body of that Head in whom that for which we hope is brought to fulfillment.”

The lives of countless saints attest to the truly astonishing supernatural vitality that hope gives. There is hardly anything comparable to the youthfulness of the saint who testifies to the reality of hope. Hope is at once relaxed and disciplined, adaptable and ready, strong-hearted, resilient, and steady. After all, even the 90-year-old man is only a fresh-faced youth compared with the eternal life in Christ that awaits us.

During this great Jubilee Year, how, then, can we revitalize the virtue of Hope in our own lives? First and foremost, in prayer.

Prayer and hope are naturally ordered to each other. Prayer is the expression and proclamation of hope. St. Thomas, commenting on the Our Father, says, “Just as our Saviour initiated and perfected our faith, so it was salutary that he should lead us to living hope by teaching us the prayer by which our hope is especially directed to God.”

On this beautiful feast and throughout this Christmas season, we can invigorate our hope by meditating on the image of the infant Christ, who is the foundation and fulfillment of our hope. In that child lying in the manger is the promise of eternal life, the promise of God’s never-failing grace. The child lying in the manger is our Hope.