I was delighted, a few mornings ago, to find my coffee cup emblazoned with the word ‘hope’ on the very first week of advent – the one where we reflect upon hope. The cafe owner didn’t know why. The producers of the coffee cup possibly didn’t even know why. But someone, surely, had associated ‘hope’ with the Christmas season. And I’d like to think it was somehow influenced by the birth of a Jewish baby in a stable some two thousand years ago.

Hope is a funny sort of thing. I’m reflecting on it in a week where I have just been told that surgery to remove my cancer is unlikely to help me live longer, a week where a good childhood friend is lying in pain after a double mastectomy, a week where I’m sure more bombs were dropped on Gaza.

Hope is a grimy sweaty thing. It is a bloody fist that refuses to let go of the ledge. Hope is not a logical deduction after an assessment of the circumstances. It is not a calculation of probabilities. It is not a passive wish or preference for a certain outcome. It is by nature, impractical, irrational, subversive. Nor is it closing your eyes to the mess around you. Hope is a steadfast, illogical, stubborn refusal to believe that your current circumstances will reign. An unquantifiable, incomprehensible knowing in your soul. 

And I am told that all authority on heaven and earth has been surrendered to Him – the one who came to set the captives free, to heal the sick, and to make everything new. And yet children are being killed in their houses. My friend is experiencing post-surgery complications. And I still have metastatic cancer. 

But I am learning that Hope does not flow in from my circumstances. Hope is a fireball released from heaven that falls upon my heart and shoots out into the world around me, transforming my circumstances into something other than what they were. I am learning that Hope is a person. And he broke, bawling, into this world, through the placenta of a Jewish teenager in Roman-occupied Bethlehem.

And I have started to develop a sympathy for the original recipients of this Hope – the ones who were desperate, living in oppression and pain, who had spent a thousand years longing for a saviour. And I am realising, in its way, the manger is as offensive to me as the cross, as offensive as children dying, my friend lying in pain, as the cancer that is still active in my body. 

I had always judged the Jews for rejecting him – for rejecting a crucified Messiah – for being the ones to crucify him. But now that I finally know what it is to be desperate, I feel their pain, their indignation. I feel their disbelief at the way he came. At the way he chooses to come. 

But the thing about receiving a Hope we do not create, is that we don’t get to set its parameters. We are not writing the story. The Hope of the world came in a way that the first recipients struggled with, were heartbroken by, didn’t want. And he still seems to come that way. In a way that is confounding and gut wrenching and bitterly disappointing. And also transforming and electrifying and with the promise of changing everything we ever knew. 

So, the hope of the world is a different Hope to the one we always thought that we were getting.

And maybe that’s the Hope that we need.