Our faith and our love are ever incomplete as long as we walk this earth, and they are constantly threatened with extinction. For this is in truth the time of Advent. Nobody can claim, “I am redeemed once and for all.” In this temporal world we do not find redemption as a completed fact of the past, nor redemption as a completed, final act of the present; rather, redemption is found only in the manner of hope.
God’s light illuminated this world in no other way than in the light of hope, put by his loving kindness as guides on our way. How often are we saddened by this: we long for more, we desire the full, complete, incontestable reality here and now. And yet, in the end we have to admit – could there be a way of redemption more appropriate than the one telling us, who are ever becoming and on our way, that we have reason to hope? Could there be a better guiding light for us, who are ever pilgrims, than the one that sets us free to step ahead without fear, because we know, at the end of the journey, there waits the light of an eternal love?
Formerly on the Ember Wednesday in Advent we found in the liturgy of the Mass precisely this mystery of hope. The Church on this day presented it to us in the person of the Mother of the Lord, the Holy Virgin Mary. In these weeks of Advent she stands before us as the woman who carries the hope of the world in her womb and thus walks ahead of us on our way as the sign of hope. She stands before us at the woman in whom the humanly impossible has been made possible through God’s saving mercy. And thus she becomes a sign for us all. For relying solely on ourselves, on the meager flame of our good will and the wretchedness of our deeds, we will not achieve salvation. This is utterly insufficient. It is impossible. Yet God, in his mercy, has made possible the impossible. We only have to say, in complete humility, “Behold, I am servant of the Lord” (cf. Lk 2:37f., Mk 10:27).
From: Vom Sinn des Christseins, pp. 69f.
