First Sunday of Lent – 9 March 2025 – First Reflection on Hope in the Year of Jubilee: Hope born from our Hunger
This year we celebrate our Season of Lent in a Year of Jubilee. And the theme of this Year of Jubilee is that of Hope. “Hope does not disappoint” (Rom 5:5) is the scriptural verse chosen to highlight this. Therefore, this particular Lent seems an opportune time for us to explore together the nature of Hope. Over each Sunday of Lent this year, therefore, I would like to focus on Hope, and to invite us into a journey of reflection on Hope. What is hope? From where does it arise? Why is it so important in our life of faith? What is its connection to faith and charity? How can we be agents of hope for others? Why is the exercise of hope so important in our world?
On this the First Sunday of Lent, let us focus on how we might commonly think of hope. What is this thing we call hope? And what is its link to our prayer?
It seems to me that we naturally hope for that which we want but do not have. And this is the way that we most commonly use the word, hope. “I hope that the weather tomorrow will be fine.” “I hope that the challenging situation in which I find myself, will work out.” “I hope my children will grow to be ok.” “I hope I get the job for which I am applying.” “I hope I get through what I am facing in one piece.” And on the other hand, we talk of a situation as “being hopeless”, meaning that we can’t possibly see a way through, or we can’t see what things might be like on the other side of the mess we facing. “There’s not a hope in hell” we might say, meaning that something we may have considered as a possibility is never going to occur in any circumstance.
In all these situations, we are hoping for something out of a certain lack, a particular absence, a kind of emptiness. Hope fills the void, almost. Its origin is about a certain deprivation; it arises from our neediness. It is indicative of our incompleteness. And, in a certain sense, it relates to where we hunger in our life. In this sense, hope exposes our hunger. The hungers of our heart, of course, are many. They are intimately linked to our needs: our needs for safety and belonging, for affection and relationship, for self-esteem and security. We hunger for love, we hunger for acceptance, we hunger for understanding – and we seek to have this hunger filled in so many ways that in the end cannot achieve for what we most deeply hope. So often we are actually afraid of our hunger. We are afraid of just how intense it is, of seeing it for what it is. And so, we pretend to ourselves and to one another that we are not hungry. Yet, our hungers are always present with us in one way or another. To be human, is to be hungry: at different times and in different seasons of life, we are hungry physically, emotionally or spiritually.
Our hunger gives rise to our hoping. And it is with this hope that we often pray. Our hunger exposes a need in our life, and we pray that the need be meet. This is the prayer we commonly refer to as the prayer of intercession. It is the prayer that comes out of the awareness of our hunger on the one hand, and on the other hand, our awareness of our dependency on a Source of life that is bigger than ourselves.
At times, our prayer, full of hope, can be an abdication of what should be our own responsibility, an avoidance of our own legitimate authorship of life. It can be a way of escaping the acceptance that life is unpredictable and, at times, even harsh. We expect God to do what, in fact, God expects of us. Sadly, we often hear the lament, “God never seems to answer my prayers.” In other words, my hope never gets realized. I am left where I am, nothing has changed. And we can slide into despair, or resentment or cynicism because our hopes continuously seem thwarted.
Yet, more positively, our prayer of intercession is ultimately a prayer of creative dependency. It affirms to us our creaturehood, that we are not creations of ourselves, but the creations of Someone other than ourselves. And even more, prayer can become the space in which we can allow ourselves simply to be hungry. Our prayer can be the space in which we no longer have to pretend. Lent, especially, is a time for us to be honest about our hungers and to bring those hungers before God. We are invited to become more aware of our cravings, and all the unhelpful ways we seek satisfaction but in a way that simply leaves us hungrier. And then our hope is not simply for something. Rather our hope is about something. We move away from placing an expectation on God to have our needs met to hoping something about life itself, to opening our hearts to engage with life, to wondering how we can navigate all of life’s unpredictability and sometimes its harshness with courage, with creativity, with compassion.
The more aware we are aware of the way in which our own hearts and souls are hungry, the more we see and hear, however, the hunger of others. We live into the knowledge that ‘hunger and thirst makes friends of us all’ to paraphrase John O’Shea. We are united in our hunger, and we express this solidarity whenever we come together to pray for our needs. When someone falls sick or is in need there is within us an instinctive need to pray for this person. We ask others to pray for us when we are in need or others ask us to pray for them. We join together in hope. Then, we are not hoping individually as persons, we are hoping together as a community. And this shared, common hope can be very powerful. When we come together in our hope, I believe the strength of our bonds has an effect in ways that are not open to rational reflection. And there is also an act of resistance at work here: it is resistance to the forces in our world that run on the illusion of control and total self-determination. Praying together for a certain need, hoping together in our hunger, subverts any complacency of self-sufficiency as it overturns the message that the status quo is the full horizon. As Christians we believe that the status quo is never the full horizon: things do not have to be this way; we can keep moving, keep growing, keep opening out into life. At every Mass, our “Prayers of the Faithful” or “General Intercessions” express this awareness.
And so our shared hope expresses that our God is the God of life who is calling us into richer and more abundant life. It expresses our commitment to struggle through the obstacles to that life, to have those obstacles removed. It gives us the courage needed to keep living and working. To keep loving. It is our hope then that we always break forth from the past and the present into a future.
