In the film Jesus of Nazareth from the 1980s, an old rabbi awaiting the coming of the Messiah comments that “a future without hope is like a night without stars.” This line came back to me last year when I was first thinking of the meaning of hope in the context of the Jubilee of hope proclaimed by Pope Francis. I’ve always found hope to be a rather slippery concept, not easy to get a clear definition of, certainly not easy for me to clearly distinguish from faith. We are probably all aware of the line from the first letter to the Corinthians in which Paul reminds us at the end of his great hymn to love that “These three remain: faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” Hope, then, is one of the three theological virtues and central to the life of the Christian. Along with faith in God and love of God expressed in love of our neighbour and our world, we are called to be a people of hope.
This is perhaps even more evident in these days of Advent as we await the great feast of Christmas, when so many of our scripture readings at Mass and in our prayer is focused on the coming of the Christ, “Emmanuel, God with us.” The prophet Isaiah, the great messenger of hope to the people, keeps us looking forward in expectation, reminding us that God is ever faithful. A Jewish professor of New Testament theology, Amy Jill Levine, reminds us that a trait of God is that God remembers and, by remembering, is faithful to what has been promised. Hence the incarnation: God becoming one of us that we might be truly human and thus share in that divinity. In Jesus’s words, his coming among us that we might have life in all its fulness. (John 10:10).
But I am left with the question of why Jesus never used the word “hope” in his ministry, at least not as is recorded in any of our Gospels. Over this last year I have read a lot about Christian hope, about what it might mean for us today, about how it can be lived in everyday life. I have heard it described as an attitude of trust and expectation for the future, as something to give us confidence and motivation to go forward along the ways of the Kingdom of God, responding to Jesus’s invitation “follow me.” And despite all this, I am left asking myself if Jesus truly came to simply offer hope to the people? Was he not rather a man of action, someone with a great vision for what the world could be and who wanted people to play their part in making it a reality. The urgency of the Kingdom project was not to be left for another day, for someone else, for an unknown moment in the future. The time is fulfilled and the Kingdom of God is near – turn now to God, believe the Good News (Mark 1:15). It is a present reality, not a future hope. The Kingdom was to be found in the here and now (Luke 17:21) not in some far-off future. At the same time, it is not yet fully realized and we have to play our part in bringing it about.
Maybe that is where the hope is to be found; an attitude of joyful expectation whilst living the reality of the present moment. Just as at Christmas we celebrate the incarnation, we are at the same time looking forward to the coming of Christ at the end times, as well as recognizing him in the events of everyday life. As Karl Barth famously said, he thinks about God with the bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. The full quote invites us to read both but to interpret the newspaper in the light of the Word of God. To see the world around us in the light of what we know about God here present to us in the events of everyday life. In doing so, we are perhaps on the way to becoming a people of hope, a people who can do what Jesus asks, who recognize that the Kingdom is not fully present and thus keeps faith in the possibility.
So, how do we find hope in the Gospels, the life and ministry of Jesus, his death and resurrection? For me, it comes back to the very beginning of the Good News: “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory,” as John’s prologue so beautifully puts it. With the coming of Christ, God’s reign of justice and peace have taken root in human history. God has come closer to us than we could ever imagine, one like us in all things but sin (cf. Hebrews 4:15). His glory has been seen by all who have eyes to recognise his presence and the signs of the Kingdom around us. Jesus shows us what it means to have a radical dependence on God, a trust that in doing God’s will we become a people of the resurrection, a people who never lose hope. With hope in Christ, we look beyond the circumstances of the present moment. We look to resurrection as we realise that we cannot speak of incarnation without also speaking of resurrection. Our hope is not limited by what we can achieve by our own efforts – by our commitment to building the Kingdom of God we keep Christian hope alive in our world.
At the end of the day, I am left with the phrase about what we most remember in our encounters with others: it is not what they said that we remember, but how they made us feel. Jesus may not have been recorded using the word hope, but he left us the promise that he is with us to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). And that perhaps is where hope can be found, experienced and lived. And where we too get the courage to be people of action, building the Kingdom.
Kevin Melody O.Carm
