Pope Francis: In Advent, it is important to reflect on
hope
(Vatican Radio) At his General Audience on Wednesday, Pope
Francis began a new series of catecheses on “Christian Hope”.
In our times, which seem so dark, the Pope said we often
feel “lost in the face of the wickedness and the violence that surround us.” We
may even feel “discouraged, because we feel powerless, and it seems the
darkness might never end.”
But we should never give up hope, he continued, “because
God, with His love, journeys with us, He does not leave us alone, and the Lord
Jesus has overcome evil, and opened up the path of life.”
It is important to reflect on hope during this season of
Advent, when we prepare for the coming of Christ at Christmas. Pope Francis
based his reflection primarily on a passage from Isaiah, in which God tells the
prophet, first, to console his people, and then to “make straight the path of
the Lord.”
This prophetic message was addressed to the people of Israel
when they were living the tragedy of the exile in Babylon, when they had been
taken out of their own land and deprived of their freedom and dignity, and even
their trust in God. But the call of the prophet, the Pope said, “opens their
hearts anew to faith.” It is precisely in the desert that they hear his call,
it is precisely there that a new journey “can be made in order to return not
only to their homeland, but to God.”
This passage, Pope Francis continued, was the starting point
for the preaching of John the Baptist, “a voice crying out in the desert,
prepare the way of the Lord.” In Jesus time, the Israelites were once again
living a kind of exile, living as strangers in their own land because of the
oppression of the Romans. But it was not the powerful who made history, the Pope
continued; rather, history is the story of what God has done together with his
little ones, people like Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary, and the shepherds, the
simple, humble people who gathered around Jesus at his birth. “These are the
little ones,” Pope Francis said, made great by their faith,” the little ones
who know that they must keep hope alive.
“Let us allow ourselves, then,” the Pope concluded, “to
teach hope, to faithfully await the coming of the Lord, and whatever desert we
might have in our life will become a flowering garden.”
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