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JOYFUL HOPE
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There is a name for the prayer that “interrupts” the Lord’s Prayer and the Doxology: it is the “embolism” (from the Greek word meaning something added or tossed in—rather, unfortunately, like our modern use of an embolism in medical language). In it, in the original Latin, there is the phrase “…exspectantes beatam spem…” Our current Roman Missal translates this as “…[as we] await the blessed hope…”; the older version, in the Sacramentary, has a different wording: “… [as we] wait in joyful hope…” Can we truly “wait in joyful hope”? Why is it “blessed”? What does it mean to “expect” anything? I want to explore these to see what they say to us about Advent.
St Paul assures us (Romans 8:24) that we are saved in hope, but that hope is only hope in the strictest sense if we do not yet see (= experience) that for which we hope. But we must be utterly confident in the arrival of the thing we are longing for—and so I really take to task both the older and the newer translations as doing scant justice to exspectantes. After all, this word should be the equivalent of our “expecting,” meaning waiting for something we know is coming (like a baby—that’s why mothers are “expecting”). How can we have this kind of confidence? A mother’s swelling abdomen is the sign that we can truly expect a baby. What sign is there to allow us to have the same kind of utter confidence?
For St Paul and the other Apostles, the answer is the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As He was dead and is alive, so those in Christ, once dead, will also be made alive (I Corinthians 15:22; Romans 6:3-4). As He is, so will we be.
Can there be any other hope, any other expectation, that should be so joyful as this? Is there any other hope so blessed as this? So both the older and the new translations capture, in their own ways, the reality of the promise, but both fail to capture the nuance of our attitude to it: that we don’t just long for or wish for our destiny in Christ—we expect it (we are confident that it’s on the way)!
This past weekend in my homily I drew a contrast between what is “near” and what is already “here”; between what is “at hand” and what is “in hand.” No, our salvation in Christ is not “here/in hand” just yet, but because of Easter Sunday we are completely convinced that it is “near/at hand.” When, exactly? We do not know (Mark 13:32). But what, exactly? We are confident of the fact, even if not the details (I Corinthians 2:9-10). Our destiny is to be re-made in His image (Philippians 3:20-21), to enjoy (as St Augustine so wonderfully put it) the “…enjoyment of God, and of one another in God.”)
And that brings us back to the key word in the older translation of this prayer: “joyful.” We can’t imagine it, but we are confident in its reality. Our Advent preparation for the remembrance of His coming once in Bethlehem is rooted in our expectation (blessed hope, joyful hope) of that day when our Lord will call to us, in the greatest love we can never imagine. “Come ye, blessed of my Father; inherit the Kingdom…”
