All of us experience hopelessness, but why? What is hope (յոյս/hooys) and how does it grow?

Hope is active and clear. It isn’t wishful thinking or wanting very much for something to happen. It is not vague. Hope is realistic and grounded. In Armenian, to have hope means that we have been attentive to what is happening; we have done our homework; we have calculated the risk based on the evidence, we have evaluated the situation and the players in it, or the promises made to us, and now we attentively await the outcome. We anticipate. We are in a state of active expectation, and so we work toward our hope. 

For Armenian Christians, hope is based on Christ himself. At the end of every Badarak we affirm that we have evaluated him as being the completion of the Law and the Prophets. We trust him to continue bringing things to completion. That is our hope. 

We hope because we have seen the evidence of what God has done for us already, personally and on a larger scale. In every Badarak we affirm that Christ took body, soul, and mind and everything that is human; he suffered and was crucified and was buried and rose again on the third day and ascended into heaven with the same body and sat at the right hand of the Father, and he is to come with the same body and with the glory of the Father to set right everything that is wrong. He is our hope, because we have already seen the kinds of things he does. As Christ’s body, we are also one another’s hope. 

Together with love and faith, hope is what we ask for and receive from the moment of our baptism. The three go together. As we work to build up the body of Christ, we become more faithful, more hopeful and more loving. We become more worthy of the hope others place in us. More like Christ himself. Using our Badarak, sacraments, oral tradition, liturgy, Saints, Church Fathers, and the Scriptures, the following module teaches us how we can experience “Christ as Hope,” grow in hope, and bring hope to others through the Body of Christ, the Church.