Hope: the spiritual DNA shaping us

We are God’s people - HOPE is our name

For I know the plans I have for you. declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. — Jeremiah 29:11

Hebrews 11:1

Hebrews 11.1 sets down for us the best-known presentation of the Christian perspective on the links between faith and hope …  Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.  But what does it mean?  It is one of the most exciting and promising texts of scripture, yet challenging to translate, interpret and understand.

It can sound complicated but the Truth behind what the author of Hebrews is writing is a matter of rejoicing because Jesus Christ, buried and now risen from the grave is both the guarantee and guarantor of our own Hope.

Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come, realities that are still absent: it gives us something. Now. In our present life.

It gives us even now something of the reality for which are waiting, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. God’s blessings now foretell eternal blessings.

Faith draws the future into the present so that it is no longer simply a “not yet”.  While we wait for our eternal future in Christ, we can rejoice in living in his presence today. In the old language used in speaking of this, we are strengthened by the now of God's presence in Jesus Christ while at the same time looking forward to the not yet of the messianic banquet, the heavenly festivities of eternal life around the throne of Almighty God.

The fact that this future exists in the present, changes the present.

The present is enlightened by the future reality,

and thus, the things of the future spill over into those of the present and

those of the present flow into our future destiny.

NOTE: We can make sense of this once we remember how time is a human construct. Time does not exist outside of our minds and thinking processes. It is our way of managing and making sense of our existence here on earth. But for God, there is no time. He exists beyond time, living in an eternal now. This means that our present and our future are all part of the reality of who we are. The past does not end when we die and the future, in Christ who was raised from the grave, is already at work in us. Hence we can speak of the Kingdom of God being "now" and at the same time"not yet".

What the world needs now is Hope

The world can be confusing. We live in an era of considerable technological and scientific achievements, but it is also an age of misdirected hope. I say this because we are constantly tempted to replace the theological virtue of hope with the flimsy substitute of "wishing". We might like it to be, but we have no guarantee that it will happen. Think of Tatts Lotto. "Wishing" cannot give us those things our souls need.

The other obvious reality of our times is how we live in an era marked by violence. Our public broadcasts bombard us with a barrage of images showing citizens fighting police, children in Syria bloodied by war, and refugee children washed up on a beach in Greece. These can threaten hope. We can see before us what happens when God is on the margins of life or maybe quite reasonably wonder just where God is in these moments of tragedy. How is it possible to have hope when we are forced to live with these realities of suffering and evil in the world?

Be cautious in the good times

But what threatens hope, even more, today are not these tragedies and calamities that leave us feeling helpless but the soft and subtle despair we settle into when we slip into ways of living that rob us of the exalted good God wants for us. It is a state of living that comes from taking God for granted, from not pausing to listen to the voice of the Spirit in our lives. It is a consequence of a failure to pray, to hear God speaking to us in the Scriptures and from our failure to take up the graces and strengths on offer in the Eucharist and the other sacraments.

The problem is not that we hope for too much, but that we have learned to settle for so little. Without us building on the hope that is already ours, we remain stationary and bury our talents in the ground. We would not want to lose what we already have and do not step out into the world for fear of failing or finding ourselves lost and wallowing in uncertainties. We have allowed our human finiteness to shrink the horizons hope opens up for us and this is a death wish for local parish communities. We have lost sight of the transcendent dimensions of hope by prioritising our personal preferences, and by allowing ourselves to be harassed and consumed by the things of this world we believe we cannot defeat. It is a disaster once we find ourselves seeking comfort in the baubles of this world along with the chimera passing itself off as genuine hope. We choose comfort over the cross, the wide way over the narrow winding road that leads to Life through Golgotha.

We hope because God desires our friendship

Christian hope should never be puny or timid. When the great Saint Thomas Aquinas spoke of the great blessing that flows from help from others, from friends we can rely on, the One he had in mind was God. Like any friend, God desires our happiness and seeks only what is best for us. What good God wants for us is the richest and most fulfilling gift of all, namely walking "hand in hand with Him in the cool of the evening" in the present life and everlasting life with God in the next. That is the goal of Christian hope.

And, like any friend, God accompanies us on that journey. He does not watch on from some distant celestial throne, but day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, blesses us, steadies and encourages us so that the best thing we could ever hope for will be ours. Hope enables us to experience the same God who journeyed with Israel during the Exodus. He was with them as a cloud by day and a fire by night. God fought for them, guided them, fed them, and led them to refreshing waters. He loved them so much that he made a covenant with them and led them into the land overflowing with milk and honey. That same God is our hope.

This is why hope is not something we achieve through hard work, grit, and determination. Hope is what happens when we intentionally build our lives around God.

Hope is inescapably a gift.

Hope is the gift God bestows on us so that we can turn our lives to God, seek God, grow in the love and goodness of God and someday know the unbroken beatitude that comes from living in perfect communion with God. And here is some even better news: If hope arises from our yearning for something good, then Christian hope is naturally an act of daring courage because Christian hope reaches for an unsurpassable good, we already, if imperfectly, possess. That is worth repeating:

hope reaches for an unsurpassable good we already if imperfectly, possess. This end of hope is the very life, love, goodness, and joy of God gifted to us through faith, in hope and manifested in love.

Christianity infinitely expands the horizon of hope because, as the glory of salvation history reflected in the life of God's children Israel, testifies, the scope of Christian hope is determined not by our own power or resources or ingenuity but by God’s inexhaustible love and goodness.

 Christians should never be anything other than bold and daring with hope because we know that God is both the object of our hope and the means to attain it.

Bishop Michael Hough                                    Number 2.                                     January 2025