The Real Hope Jesus Offers You this Advent – Advent 2025

Summary

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Advent is a season of Hope, where we ponder the mystery of the Incarnation–that God became man so that we might have eternal life. In this talk, Katie Hartfiel dives into the virtue of Hope and how both our sufferings and joys have meaning and can work for our salvation.

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Reflective Study Guide Questions

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“The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.”

Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi

1. What does “Hope” mean to you? What does it look like in your life? Do you believe suffering has meaning?

2 . When in your life have you felt hopeless? Looking back, are you able to see how God was working in that season of your life?

3. How does remembering the Incarnation—the God who became man—renew your sense of hope?

4. Where in your life right now is God inviting you to hope more deeply?

Text:  The Real Hope Jesus Offers You this Advent

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Hello, my name is Katie Hartfiel. Let’s go ahead and start in a prayer.

Opening Prayer

In the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Lord Jesus, we thank you for this opportunity to come and to sit with you, to hear your voice, to hear the message of your hope and of your goodness. We ask that you’ll bless over all of these who are praying with us during this time of Advent, increasing the hope and the desire for you within each of our hearts.

And we ask the Blessed Mother that she’ll pray with us and for us. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, Amen. In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

A Personal Experience of Hopelessness

So today we’re going to be talking about Advent specifically as a season of hope. So I wanted to start with my own story, which is actually the story of the time in my life when I was probably the most hopeless, and this is when I was in high school. And actually just to kind of back up a little bit, I had an incredible youth group experience when I was in high school. Really, really strong program. And I would go on all of these different retreats and there was a very particular experience that I had the summer before my senior year of high school, a program that’s now known as Franciscan LEAD.

And it’s a week-long experience right before the Steubenville Youth Conferences, where it’s about 35 kids, and you really learn how to dive deep into your prayer life, into your relationship with the Lord. Something that kept coming up for me over the course of that week was that God had a plan for my life, that God had a plan for my vocation, a best way for me to get to heaven. And I remember sitting before the Blessed Sacrament and talking to Jesus about this and about the fact that if I was called to marriage, if that was the best way for me to get to heaven, that the Lord surely knew the best person to get me there and for me to help get to heaven as well.

And I was praying about that, and I was praying, okay, if this is true, then this means that this person must be out there somewhere, right now, at this very moment. And if that’s true, and thinking about all of the temptations and how hard it was to be a teenager, I realized, oh my goodness, I need to pray for this man. And I kind of dabbled in that a little bit before, but I decided that week I’m going to war. I’m climbing the trenches and I am going to pray for my future husband, wherever he is, if he’s in need of conversion. And I started writing out these prayers in the form of letters to my husband to be really wanting to make him concrete in my life. So I go home and I’m all fired up about the Lord.

A couple months go by, it’s October of my senior year, and my dad leaves a note one morning and says that he’s leaving our family. And I was absolutely destroyed. All these things that I thought that I knew about what marriage was going to be and what vocation was going to be, and all of these things were brought into question. And my dad would leave, and he would come back, and he would leave and come back, and leave and come back.

And things continued to feel like I was having these seasons of hope when he would come back and everything was going to be restored and better, and things continued to get worse over the course of two years. And I really struggled in my relationship with, obviously with my own father, but also asking God like, isn’t it supposed to be, you know, that we signed up for these things, and we pray, and then things go well in our life? But something that kept me so anchored at that time was maybe things can be different for me, that maybe I could have hope in my life.

I ended up transferring to Franciscan University in Steubenville and ended up meeting this tall, dark, handsome young man from Texas, and really growing in this great friendship with him. Of course, this is a very long story short. One thing leads to another. We have the “define the relationship” conversation. And it was really difficult for me because I had a lot of trust issues and I was really terrified of putting my heart out there with the opportunity for it to be broken.

He Hears Our Prayers

So after a lot of kind of ups and downs in this category, we start dating. And we’re pretty deep into our dating relationship, one night we’re on the phone, he’s talking about his high school experience, which was very different from mine. He was really into the party scene, really gifted in sports and all of the things that came along with that. So one night, he was not in prayer, he wasn’t thinking about God, he’s just alone in his room. And he describes it as if the Holy Spirit just filled the space. And for the first time in his life, he understood, without a shadow of a doubt, that God loved him. And he started weeping, like the gravity of this reality that it was his face that Jesus saw as he was dying on the cross. And he knew that there was a lot of things that he needed to stop doing, but also a lot of things that he needed to start doing in his life, and that he could never be the same.

So we’re talking about this this night on the phone. I ask him if he knows the date of his conversion. He tells me the date. I walk over in my room, I was at home at the time, and I pull out the journal from the week of his conversion. And as I opened it up and I start reading, it was the same week that I was at Franciscan LEAD that I decided that I was going to go to war, praying for my future husband, if he needed conversion, and I had a list, a laundry list, very specifically of all of the things, that he’s struggling with all of these things, and word-for-word, it was his list. And I share this story with you today, not just because it’s my love story, and because I really love it, but because this is a story of what our God does.

Millions of times every single day that we bring ourselves in prayer, and that he hears us. And I think that during this time I was so shortsighted in a lot of ways, thinking that my prayer was more like a wish, right? And that my prayer was more like of a demand, or that I was going to have this formula, if I said the right thing is that God was going to come in and He was somehow going to force my dad to have a change within his life, and that He was going to force him to come home, and He was going to force him to love him, and He was going to force him to be a good father and to be a good husband. But this is not what hope is, right? That hope is not a wish within our life. Hope is the reality that all of the things in our life have meaning, that the suffering in our life has meaning, that the joys in our life have meaning, that the trials and the triumphs, that all of it means something, and that God has a plan, that He has a purpose. Sometimes we get to see it, sometimes we don’t.

And in this story, this is a time where the Lord, many years later, showed me very specifically that He was listening. But this is what our God does every day, that He orients our life towards hope, towards purpose, towards meaning. And for those of you who are suffering in your life, those of you who are asking the big questions, the answers to those questions can feel urgent. And this is because we were made to hope, to long for something. And this is what hope actually means.

It All Has Eternal Meaning

If we look at the Catechism, and this is from paragraph 1817, that, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire and expect from God both eternal life and the grace that we need to attain it.” That actually what hope is about is yes, that all of these things have meaning, but that they’re all supposed to be pointing to heaven. That they all have meaning, and that is eternal meaning. Eternal meaning. That all of God’s plans, everything in our life, is for something more, that it’s all about heaven. If we want hope, it has to be that we are longing for heaven in a way that it is what makes us get out of bed in the morning. That it’s all about eternal life. And for a lot of us, we don’t think about heaven actually all that often. That it is probably the most important moment in our life, the moment that we die. And yet we don’t think about it that much. I think because it’s unpleasant, but also because we have very low expectations of what heaven must be like.

I remember one time Googling images of heaven, and these different pictures showing up that look kind of like Oz. You know, you have like a nice gate and a golden road leading up to a palace, maybe different animals walking around. And I look at those and I think, you know, this looks like a really nice place to go on vacation. But when I’m in the throes of temptation, am I thinking I would really like to hold out for the eternal petting zoo, of glory, of streets paved with gold and, you know, nice rivers that are flowing through, and things like that. Is it what’s really motivating me? But really we don’t understand what heaven truly is, which is part of what makes it so difficult.

My second child, Clare, she is my only introvert in the family. Everybody else likes to tell me all about their feelings and about what’s going on at all times. But Clare would come home, this story, she was probably about six or seven years old, and she would come home from our homeschool hybrid school, and I’d say, “Clare, how was your day?” And she would say, “It was good.” “Really? What did you do today?” “Stuff.” “what kind of stuff?” And she would say, “Super cool stuff that you probably wouldn’t understand.” But no specifics. So one day she’s sitting at our breakfast table and she’s eating her cereal. And she says to me, “I’m scared to die.” Like, wow! Of all the things that you don’t want to tell me from the depths of your heart, we’re going to lead with death, right? And of course, with parenting, a lot of times we are just trying to figure things out as they go along. So I’m like, I don’t know what to do with this situation. So I’m trying to stall. So I asked her a follow up question. “Okay, Clare, well, why are you afraid to die?” And she said, “I’ve never died before. And I don’t know anybody who has ever died before. And I don’t know what it’s going to be like, so I’m not going to do it.” Very fair, very valid. I think this resonates, right, with all of us, and this is what makes it so hard. But I heard before that for us to try to imagine what heaven is like is like an unborn baby trying to imagine what the world is like.

Oh, and I love that analogy so much. When you think about a baby that is first born, and they come into the world and they’re terrified, right, at first. They have to breathe oxygen, which they’ve never done before. It’s cold. There’s all of these lights. They’re being manhandled through the air, and they are screaming, screaming. And the reason why they’re yelling is because if they could speak, what they would be saying is, “Put me back in.” It’s probably the worst day of our lives, if we really think about it, which we wouldn’t want to think about for very long, right? But it is a crazy transition. Like this baby wants more than anything for the next several months, as they’re getting used to the world, they want to be back in the womb. That’s why we have to rock them, because it reminds them of being there. That’s why they like white noise and things like that. That’s why they like to be swaddled because they want to be back in the womb.

And for us, you know, we can think about this and think about our desire for heaven, right? But as we think about a baby that’s in the womb, the best thing that they have in order to be able to imagine what might be out there is the faint light, that they can see a shadow, that they can hear muffled sounds of something that is beyond, right? But never in our life do we ever, ever, ever think now, “I wish I could go back into the womb. It was really great there.” Nobody ever thinks that, you know? We never, ever, ever have that thought in our life.

And I guarantee you, when you go to heaven, you are not for a fraction of a second going to say, “I miss Earth. Really wish that I could make it back there. I really wish that I could go back.” Because it’s going to be something that eye has not seen, an ear has not heard. What has not entered into the human heart, into the human imagination, is what God has in store for those who love Him. And even though we don’t understand it fully, this is what it is to hope, to believe, and to trust that God has something that is greater than our greatest expectations in our life. That the best experiences that we have ever had in our life are a muffled sound, a faint light, of something that is beyond.

The Story of Lazarus

I want to share a story with you today, my favorite story actually from the scriptures, a story of a death, a story of a death, and of a resurrection. And this is the story of Lazarus, which is very well known to us, but so rich and so deep. And if we look at the very beginning of the story, what we see is that the sisters, Martha and Mary, they send word to Jesus, asking Him to come because Lazarus is sick. “And they send him a letter and it says to him, ‘Master, the one you love is ill.'” That here are these sisters and they are hoping that Jesus is going to come and that He is going to save. And it says that, “After this, Jesus said to the disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea.’ And the disciples said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you, and you want to go back there?’ And Jesus said to them clearly, ‘Lazarus has died. Let us go to him.'”

And so Jesus and his disciples, they go, and they travel, and they make it to the scene. And Jesus is too late. That this is a very hopeless moment, if you look at it on the surface. It’s not just that He’s too late, but He’s way too late. That Jesus has already been in the tomb, that it’s way too late, that Lazarus has already been in the tomb for several days. And Jesus is there and He’s coming into the city. And Mary hears that He’s there, and she goes running out. And it says, “Mary came to where Jesus was and she saw him and she fell at His feet.

And she said to Him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ And Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her weeping. And He became perturbed and deeply troubled and said, ‘Where have you laid them?’ And he became perturbed and deeply troubled. And he said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ And they said to him, ‘Come and see.’ And Jesus wept. And Jesus perturbed came to the tomb, and it was a cave, and a stone lay across it. And Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?'”

And so here Jesus is, in this moment of hopelessness. A stench, a rotting corpse that lay before Him. “And so they took away the stone, and Jesus raised His eyes and said, ‘Father, I thank you for hearing me. I know that you always hear me, but because of the crowd here, I have said this that they may believe that you sent me.’ And when He had said this, He cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out.’ And the dead man came out, tied hand and foot with burial cloths, and his face was wrapped in a cloth.” And when we look at this story and we see that Martha and Mary are crying out to Jesus, and Jesus allows for Lazarus to die, knowing that there is purpose, knowing that there is meaning, and knowing that there is hope.

But if we look back to the verse that always jumps out to me more than any other verse in this passage, that we know is the shortest verse in the entire Bible, “Jesus wept.” I always think of this moment that Jesus comes and everybody’s maybe excited, like Jesus is finally here, but we think it’s too late, but maybe we have this hope. And Jesus arrives and He starts crying. And I picture all the people standing there and looking at him, and like looking at each other like, “Wait, is He, is He crying? I’m pretty sure we’re doomed. Like, Jesus is crying.” And this verse never really made sense to me until I started really diving into the meaning of this passage. And when we look at it, what we see is Jesus knew the end of the story.

He knew what He was going to do. And as He shows up, He’s not like, “Everybody just calm down. Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal. It’s going to be fine. Pull yourselves together.” Jesus wept. And I want to talk about two very important reasons why Jesus wept in this passage. And the first is that just because Jesus knew what was coming did not mean that His people were not in pain. It did not mean that He did not have compassion for their suffering, that it didn’t hurt Him deeply to know what they were going through at this time. The word “compassion” comes from the Latin words com, which is with, and passion, to suffer. That Jesus came to suffer with them, that He entered into their suffering.

Jesus Wept

And in the hardest time of my life, during the depression and the anxiety and the despair that I was experiencing as my family fell apart around me, the most comforting thing that somebody said to me wasn’t, “It’s going to be okay. God is in control. There’s a plan.” It was actually, “Katie, Jesus is crying with you. That He is here and He is in pain and His heart is breaking, and He is here with you.” And the second reason why Jesus wept in this passage is if we go back here to this verse, towards the beginning, it says, “He said to His disciples, ‘Let us go back to Judea.’ And the disciples said to Him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just trying to stone you and you want to go back there?'” Things are not going well for Jesus in this area of the country. And in fact, after this story, after Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, it goes on to say, this is the end of the Lazarus story, “Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and had seen what had been done, began to believe in Him.” And then the Pharisees get together, and they meet. And it says in verse 53, “And from that day on, they planned to kill Him.”

Jesus wept because in a very real way, Jesus came back to trade His life for Lazarus’s, that He knew it was the final straw. And the next story in this book is Palm Sunday. That Jesus came back for Lazarus. He came back for the one that He loved. He came back for Lazarus, not just to raise him from the dead, but to take on his anguish, to take on his stench, to become Lazarus’s sin because, my brothers and sisters, this is not a story of something that happened 2000 years ago. This is a story about you, and this is a story about me. That Jesus came to trade His life, to become our sin, to walk that road of Calvary, to die in order that Lazarus may live, in order that you may live, in order that I may live. That this is hope. That this is hope, that 2000 years ago, when Jesus was given this opportunity, that Jesus saw your face.

He came back for Lazarus, and He is coming back for you in this Advent season, in the sacraments, in the Eucharist, in the mass, in your prayer, in the silence of your heart, that Jesus is coming to pursue you, to offer you reconciliation, to cleanse you, and to raise you to life, to see your face, and to say, “I want you with me forever.” Will you hope?

Closing Prayer

Let’s pray, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Lord Jesus, you are so good, and you weep with us, and you weep for us. You suffer with us, and you suffer for us. And Lord, you desire to offer us hope. A hope that is eternal. We ask that you will increase that desire within our hearts, within our lives, and to make it the motivation of everything that we do in every single day. And we ask the Blessed Mother who lived in that hope, hoping for a Messiah, bringing a Messiah, following a Messiah, leading all of us to the Messiah, that she will pray with us and for us. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

About Katie Hartfiel

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