THINKING ANEW:IT IS DIFFICULT to speak of hope in these pre-budget days of "encircling gloom." While there is widespread concern for the future those on the margins of society, the most vulnerable have more reason to be fearful – their fears not made any easier by politicians and their cruel mind games designed to "soften us up" for the pain to come.
Have they really become that soulless? At a human level it is very hard in such circumstances to think in terms of hope apart from the vain hope of burying our heads in the sand and hoping our problems will go away and solve themselves.
In this Advent season hope, however, is very much on the agenda – but a different kind of hope. It is not about trust in human systems, economic or otherwise. It is not about a secular optimism or some kind of earthly Utopia. It is not something we invent in order to make us feel better.
It is a given hope focused on the reality of God and based on our experience and understanding of his activity in human affairs. It is grounded in the belief that even though we will make a total mess of our human affairs again and again God still remains in ultimate control and engaged and has demonstrated that fact in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Father John S Dunne professor of theology at Notre Dame University, who is known for his reflective, spiritual writings, develops the idea of hope as a transforming force in our lives: “When hope does awaken, an entire life awakens along with it. One comes fully to life. It begins to seem indeed that one has never lived before. One awakens to a life that is eternal in prospect, a life that opens up before one all the way to death and beyond, a life that seems able to endure death and survive it.
“Wherever hope rises, life rises. When one first enters upon the spiritual adventure hope rises where there was no hope before, where there was a life of ‘quiet desperation’, and life rises too, the life of the spiritual adventure, the sense of being on a journey in time. There is something to live for where before there was nothing.” This Christian hope is not some futuristic “pie in the sky” thing, rather it is real and hugely significant for the way we deal with the concerns we have to deal with day by day.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian, who was imprisoned by the Nazis for his opposition to their regime, was sentenced to death on Hitler’s direct orders. In an extraordinary turn of events just before his execution on Good Friday 1945 some of his fellow prisoners asked him to hold a religious service – for them.
Bonhoeffer hesitated because they were such a diverse group and he did not want to impose on them. But they insisted and so he did as they asked. For his address he chose these words from the First Letter of Peter: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”
One of his fellow prisoners later described the hope and encouragement they derived from his words which were firmly rooted in the Gospel: “He reached the hearts of all of us finding the right words to express the spirit of our imprisonment, and the thoughts and resolutions which it had brought. Together with him we all looked forward thankfully and hopefully into the future.”
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is God's greatest act; it has created our faith and it is the ground of the hope that he has given us, a hope that can never be taken from us. – GORDON LINNEY