Growing up in Nigeria, I am familiar with the rituals of staying awake and keeping a vigil in preparation for a grand celebration the next day. Socializing, listening to tales and stories from friends, praying, reading, dancing, and just looking up into the skies are all part of the rituals of staying awake and keeping a vigil.
Yet, in the Gospel of Matthew (24:37–44) for the first Sunday of Advent in 2025, Jesus portrays a disturbing narrative of what would happen at the coming of the Son of Man. To ensure that his followers are not caught off guard, he enjoins them to stay awake and be prepared for what would befall all of creation at the right moment of history.
A closer reading of the pericope allows one to ask a question that can help one to make the proper connections to the moral life that the season of Advent instantiates: What is the content of staying awake, and how does it foster hope?
To stay awake is to be intentionally aware. This is because there is intentionality in the process of not being awake but choosing to be awake. The turn to choice is the beginning of the ethical grounding of oneself. But what has this choice to do with Advent? In other words, why does the Church ground Advent in hope and consider this Matthean text as the proper one to be read on this first day of Advent?
To address this question, one has to rethink what the content of hope is. Too often, we have been conditioned to think that the Christian virtue of hope entails a type of passive expectation. What we ought to do is simply pray, and God will deliver what we desire. This approach to hope belongs to the domain of magic and does not reflect the covenantal nature of the relationship we have with God.
What if hope is not about expecting? Rather, it is more about being. What would that mean for us who embrace faith in Christ? We already see glimpses of this type of understanding of hope by reading closely the text from the Prophecy of Isaiah (2:1–5). In this text, an eschatological vision is presented. On the mountain of God, a new way of being in the world shall be manifested and shall be embraced by all because this new way of being will upend old ways of being where violence reigns supreme.
In this vision, God leads God’s people, and in fidelity to God, they will embrace a counter-logical social norm. In the face of the hegemonic threat from the Assyrian Empire, here is God reminding Israel of what it means to be an empire. As it were, Israel must foster a new logic in the world where communion and solidarity must be the core values. Violence must be shunned, and peace is to be embraced. Where the other is seen as a stranger in the old way, the other is to be a friend. Where desolation is the norm, laughter and joyfulness must prevail. Where the old empire of Assyria and all who embrace its logic are to be feared, the new vision of a state that is ritualized on the mountain of God, Jerusalem, will be a place that fosters joyful celebrations of all people.
In fact, Jesus’ use of the motif of wakefulness by linking it to the biblical account of Genesis on the salvific intervention of God at a time of cosmic crisis speaks to the argument of hope as an active way of being in the world. Noah was actively living a life of fidelity to God. And it was in this that the hope of a new beginning was instantiated by the intervention of God. Similarly, the vision of Isaiah for Judah is not something that resides solely in the domain of desire. Rather, it is a summon to the biblical Israelites to live differently because only through this way can a culture of peace and inclusivity be cultivated.
Central to the virtue of hope is the existential praxis of joyfulness. As the Psalmist rightly notes, Jerusalem is God’s instantiation of divine joy, and anyone who comes up to it must be transformed by this turn to joy. Consequently, the new Judah that God wants Israel to embrace must be one crafted in the domain of joyful hope. In other words, the covenantal bond between God and Israel must be mediated through an embrace of the praxis of joy not only for the Israelites, but for all nations as well.
For contemporary society, especially for nations and communities that continue to experience different forms of violence, hope, understood as joyful hope, may be too abstract. Yet, Christian faith speaks of God’s promise of a new beginning that is crafted in the covenantal solidarity of hope that is saturated with joy. Yes, the grieving heart must grieve. But grief should not overcome the enduring promise of God, which is a promise of enduring joy that grounds the content of hope. The covenantal bond of hope invites all who are neighbors of those who mourn or are distrustful to work actively at addressing the structures that produce grief.
In Nigeria, where hundreds of families are anxious for their children who have been kidnapped by religious terrorists, our solidarity through hope demands that we actively journey with them. Their sorrow ought to be ours, and our joy ought to be shared with them as well. Passivity cannot be how we enter into solidarity with them.
If hope is a covenantal bond between God and us believers, then a turn to hope must be a bond that links all to the saturated joy of God. Jerusalem, the symbol of God’s joy, is a sign of the enduring joy of hope that ought to guide all of our relationships. Thus, we must live joyfully in a manner that allows others to embrace the saturated Joy that God has released into the world and hearts of all people from the mountain of joy.
