This year, I have said this many times in various places during the preparatory time for Christmas. Yes, it is about the four candles in the Advent wreath and the four themes in preparation for Christmas. It's a custom in the Western Church to light a candle additionally each week, meditating on a specific theme.
The themes for the four weeks of Advent are hope, peace, joy, and love. Christmas is when these four things come together. Although it sounds very simple at the first hearing, when you consider it in the light of the Scriptures, you realize that they are not at all what the world would think that they are.
We generally think of hope as expectation. Expectation is something rational. Therefore, it is not like expecting cold weather in January, or like sowing good seeds, fertilizing well, and expecting a good harvest, especially when the weather has been good. Hope is expecting something unreal - a miracle- without having any external evidence of, or even any indication to. Hope can only come from faith. Hope is the confident expectation that the naturally impossible will happen: after being beaten to death, buried in a tomb hewn out of rock, having the entrance sealed, and soldiers put in place to keep guard of the seal. Don’t you see that Jesus always refers to hope when he talks about suffering and death!? Don’t you also notice that he says, “Fear not” in times when there are a hundred reasons to be afraid of?
When it comes to peace, in the worldly language, peace is something that depends on several external factors. It is something that can be experienced when no one is coming to fight you; when all the government systems are working well, when there are no natural disasters, when there is development and prosperity as wanted to be. However, the peace spoken of in the Bible is not like this. As mentioned earlier, it is not something that can be experienced when there is external calm or when there are no problems at all. Peace is something that one can experience in the midst of unrest, pain, problems, and death, and it can come only from faith. It is the inner contentment that one experiences when one stays away from evil, walks close to God, and is in good relationship with oneself, other people, and the environment. One can observe that Jesus 'gives peace' to his disciples at the "hour" of his death and after his death! He clearly makes a distinction and says that he does not give peace like the world gives.
Another reality that is similar to the above two is joy. Joy is not something that comes from the material, social, or spiritual achievements, successes, or realizations. Rather, it is the inner satisfaction, strength, and joy that one experiences through the indwelling of God - in humility, rejection, persecution, and danger. Shouldn't we pay attention to what Jesus says, "If my joy remains in you, your joy will be complete" and so on?
Even love, we can say that it is somewhat similar to all the above. The Gospels do not describe love as something natural. But it is the innermost nature within nature. Love is not about giving back where it is received. It is not about giving with the expectation of getting it back. It is about giving where you don't expect to receive back at all; it is about giving knowing that you havn't received. It is about self-emptying; it is about getting out of oneself. It is something that wells forth from the very depths of oneself!
Yup. Christmas is a long way off!
