Advent Devotional by Eric Zahnd

Psalm 146:4-10

“Blessed are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God.”

(Psalm 146:5)

Dante imagined the gate to hell was inscribed with the words, “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” That seems a pretty apt description of hell. Hell is the loss of hope.

I wonder if we create our own hell on earth when we fail to believe the words of the Psalmist. We brush aside that we are the blessed children of God whose hope is in the Lord our God. We forget, as Paul put it, that “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to God’s purpose.” (Romans 8:28)

No doubt, it can be hard to maintain hope during times when life is hard and unfair. Good people often die too soon. Children sometimes get seriously ill. Employees lose jobs through no fault of their own. Millions die from war, starvation, and catastrophic events. We could go on and on.

But the injustice, pain, and loss we suffer is no different from that endured by Jesus. Jesus was unfairly maligned, wrongfully convicted, brutally tortured, and cruelly executed. It’s easy to gloss over those episodes and concentrate only on the happy events of the Gospel like the virgin birth and Resurrection. But what makes the Gospel truly Good News is that Jesus experienced the very sort of pain and sorrow we do—and worse.

The Good News of Jesus’ birth, death, and Resurrection is that good ultimately prevails. To paraphrase Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward justice.

The advent season reminds us to be people of hope and expectation. Despite the struggles and anguish sometimes present in every person’s life, the Good News of Christ’s birth is that God is with us. We can avoid the self-imposed hell that accompanies loss of hope. We can live daily with the assurance that we are blessed and God will help us, if only we put our hope in the Lord.

Eric Zahnd