First Sunday of Advent – 30 November 2025
We begin our Advent journey toward the Festival of Christmas by lighting, week by week, the candles of our Advent Wreath. Each flame represents one of the great blessings that Christmas reveals to the world: hope, faith, joy, peace, and love. These are the true gifts of Christ’s birth—gifts not simply to admire from afar, but blessings meant to be birthed in us, especially in this Jubilee Year, when the Church has invited us throughout to rediscover the mercy, renewal, and freedom that God longs to give.
The candles will light over the next four weeks burn in a world shadowed by anxiety, conflict, and uncertainty. Across nations and neighbourhoods, and even within our own hearts, we feel the tremors of a world stretched and strained. And yet these flames remind us that God’s gifts are not dependent on perfect conditions. The Jubilee reminds us of the opposite: God’s grace breaks into history precisely when the world most needs release, restoration, and return.
On this first Sunday of Advent, we light the candle of hope. Hope—like faith, joy, peace, and love—is not a passing emotion. Hope is not naïve optimism. Hope does not close its eyes to the sorrow of Gaza, the fear in Ukraine, the shrill politics of the United States, the divisions in our own society, or the silent discouragement within many hearts. As the late Jesuit poet, Peter Steele SJ once wrote, “genuine spirituality begins by allowing how things are to come home to us—deeply and truly—and responding from that honest place.”
The Jubilee now coming to its end has called us to that same truthfulness. It does not offer clichés. It does not ask us to pretend that everything is fine. Rather, it opens a wider horizon. It places our troubled world into a greater story—God’s story—so that we can see more than the noise of conflict or the weariness of our own spirits.
To live in hope, then, is not to deny that things may indeed be going quite awry. It is not to assume that everything will turn out as we would wish. Many things will not. We know that good people suffer. We see injustice, we know grief, and we experience our own disappointments. Yet even in this darkness, hope remains possible.
Why? Because Christian hope is rooted not in an imagined future but in a remembered past. Ordinary hope looks ahead. Christian hope looks back—to the mighty deeds of God. Our hope is born from memory:
We remember the long road of salvation.
We remember how God brought freedom out of slavery, return out of exile, renewal out of ruin.
We remember how Christ rose from the tomb when all seemed lost.
We remember the saints and the ordinary faithful whose trust was met by grace.
This Jubilee Year especially has invited us to remember. To remember what God has already done. To remember that mercy has shaped history. To remember that the “last word” is never the world’s word, but God’s. This memory gives us a profound intuition: that what stands before us—no matter how bleak—is never the entire picture. There is always a greater context, a broader canvas, a deeper promise. We are not abandoned to our own smallness or finitude. We are held within a story that is larger and more merciful than we can see.
May people, facing the weight of the world, come to believe that life is against them. They interpret their setbacks as verdicts, and their sorrows as final. They carry a quiet despair we see etched on their faces and hear in their conversations. This despair is one of the great spiritual illnesses of our age.
But because we remember, because we carry the memory of God’s fidelity as our deepest identity, we dare to believe that life is ultimately gracious, blessed, holy. We dare to believe that creation is good—even when wounded—and that there is a Love proven in history that holds all things together.
This conviction gives us a posture of expectation—one of the central themes of the Jubilee: the expectation that God is present and active. This expectation frees us to recognise small rays of possibility and to trust that even in the complexity of world events, God is present, working quietly, persistently, redemptively.
This is the hope we light today. The hope of a world not abandoned. The hope of a God who is faithful. The hope of a Jubilee that proclaims liberty, release, renewal. The hope of a Saviour who enters a troubled world not from afar but from within.
May this light of hope burn brightly in our hearts, our households, and our world, as we await the birth of Christ and the renewal he brings.
