We experience hopelessness when we feel we have no
effective agency, when our agency, to transform a situation we consider unjust,
is overwhelmed by the collective agency of others who hold a vested interest in
the status quo. So, hope has something to do with agency. And the paradox of
agency is that it is not self-determined, but conferred upon us, by those who
came before us, and, ultimately, by God, who confers on us a kingdom, co-heirs
with Christ.
If hope is the conviction that in the end all shall be
well, then our agency is first and foremost expressed in bearing witness to God-with-us,
the God who has such love not only for the lovely but for the unlovable. With
us, in every situation and circumstance, however yet-to-be-well.
David will become a lauded general and king, but we
first meet him as a shepherd boy, overlooked by his father and looked down upon
by his brothers. Even Joseph, whose brothers hated him so much that they
conspired to kill him, had one brother who looked out for him, and one he
loved; but David is alone in the fields with his father’s sheep. One day in the
future, he will have a son, Solomon, who will send envoys to all the royal
courts of the ancient world, and receive envoys in return, upholding a worldwide
web of knowledge and of wisdom. And at the coming of God into the world as the infant
Jesus, Bethlehem shepherds and an angel army, and magi from distant courts, converge
on the descendant of David and Solomon. That is to say, the agency of David and
Solomon and the agency of those shepherds, perhaps even those hosts of heaven,
and of those wise men some thousand years later is as one. In those agents of
the nativity, David and Solomon bear witness to the newborn king.
And that, in turn, is to say that our agency may be to
witness, more nearly in a temporal sense, what our ancestors hoped for, or to
hope for what our descendants will witness more nearly than us. But our
ancestors look through our eyes, as we shall look through the eyes of our
descendants, and what matters most is not whose eyes but the grace to see,
God-with-us in our otherwise hopeless state. Hope lives, because Christ is
born, and we have seen his glory.
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