Christmas of Hope 2024

Lesson 2: Hope is experience, share it! 

27 December, 2024 – St. John, the Apostle 

1 John 1:1-4; John 20: 2-8

The feast of St. John the Apostle comes today to assure us that the faithfulness to the Lord is to be manifested not necessarily in death, but more so in life, in daily life! While St. Stephen yesterday bore witness through death, John today teaches us how to bear witness in life. The lesson of Hope that the Word gives us today is this: Hope is experience, share it!  

The Word today abounds with terminologies of empirical nature – speaks about what has been heard, seen, watched, touched and to be shared. Hope is not imaginary, it cannot be a theory or a concept. It is empirical; it is experiential. It is all about concrete experiences of hearing, seeing, watching, touched and being touched. That is the reason Paul writes – hope does not disappoint us, it does not delude us! It does not take too much to have hope – it is enough to see, hear, perceive and hold on to what is happening around us. Even amidst the worst of experiences, there is a string of hope or a ray of hope that comes through and we would do well to single that out and hold on to it. That is a product of faith-seeing, faith-hearing and faith-perceiving. 

John today teaches us additionally that as apostles we are called not merely to have that hope, but share it, in order to complete the joy that we can experience! We are called to evince hope in our lives, as persons of God – it is in fact writing a Gospel for the world to hear, see and read! Not from the pigment of our imaginations or the skill of our creativity, but from the concrete reality of our daily experiences, we are called to manifest and share hope that comes from the unceasing presence of the Lord. As we learn to see hope presented to us, we perceive them in concrete experiences of daily life and share it with everyone around – that is being apostles of the Reign.