REsources for Living
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Christmas is a season of hope. If you’re a kid, it’s probably a season of hoping for presents. There are lists you give to parents and letters you send to Santa and lots of waiting and hoping for the very best of loot. If you think about it, that’s the way many of us who are grown up think of hope. We hope for a better job or a better car or nice weather on the weekend we’re going camping. We may not expect that Santa is going to bring us what we want, but we have a list of desires, and a lot of hope that they will be fulfilled.
Of course, the problem with that kind of hope is that you almost never get everything that’s on your list, so you’re sure to be disappointed. And even when Santa comes through for you in a big way, there’s always a new thing to add to the list, a new wish to be fulfilled. When our hope rests in the list of things that we want, there’s never really a way to be fully satisfied.
But true Christmas hope is really quite a different thing. Christmas hope rests in a baby, a baby who we are told offers a promise of salvation. That’s not at all the same thing as a list for Santa. For starters, there’s the matter of a baby. Now, anyone who is a parent can tell you that we harbor a lot of hopes for our kids. Babies are cute, squishy bundles of potential, and parents lay all kinds of wishes on those new lives. We hope that our children will be happy and healthy, that they will grow up to make the world a better place. And oftentimes we hope a whole list of things: that they will share our love of music or football, that they will get into a prestigious college, that they will star on the track team, that they will take care of us when we’re old.
And, of course, as with all wish lists, chances are good we will be disappointed. Children have a way of being interested in what they like, gifted in unpredictable ways, led by their own stars onto paths that we could never have predicted. If your hopes for your children start looking like a list for Santa, you not only risk disappointment, you risk trying to push another human being into a mold that doesn’t really suit them.
The kind of hope that works with babies is a different kind of hope. A Christmas kind of hope. It is a hope that lives in an open heart that longs for the best, but admits that we never quite know what the best will be. It is a hope that is more about listening and watching than about making sure that everything turns out the way you planned. It is hope that stands in awe in front of the cradle, knowing that you are at the beginning of an important story without any idea of how the story will turn out.
Of course, while Mary was there in the barn, holding her baby with a heart full of hope, there isn’t a chance in the world that she was looking forward to what was actually going to happen. Even if the story is true that angels appeared to Mary, announcing that she would carry the child of God, they never bothered to mention that he would be brutally murdered as a young man. No parent puts that into a story line they imagine for their child. No one hopes that terrible things will happen to their children, any more than anyone really hopes that their child will turn out to be a savior.
But, in fact, terrible things do happen all the time. So do saviors. It’s just that salvation is really more along the lines of hope for a baby than hope for a Santa Claus list. Salvation basically means “healing.” (It comes from the same root as “salve.”) And healing comes from all kinds of sources and in all kinds of forms that you might not expect. It is entirely possible that any given baby will bring healing to the world in some form or another.
No person will keep the terrible things from happening. No one can fulfill all our hopes for a life made of only comfort and safety and pleasure. That’s the wrong kind of hope. But any given person has the potential—even the likelihood—of bringing some kind of salvation, some kind of healing to this world where terrible things just keep on happening. And so, when we’re able, we live in Christmas hope. Not the expectation that everything we desire will magically appear in a moment under a glistening tree—although it’s great when that happens. Rather, we live in the hope that we can be both givers and receivers of the ongoing gift of healing, meeting the story of the world, in all of its unpredictable twists and turns, with a heart that is open and full of hope.
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