Second Sunday of Lent – 16 March 2025 – Second Reflection on Hope in the Year of Jubilee: Hope – doorway into the future
Through each Sunday of Lent in this Year of Jubilee, I have invited us to go on journey of reflection on the nature of Hope. Pope Francis has put to us the theme of Hope for this year of celebration with the scriptural verse, “Hope will not disappoint” (Rom 5:5), and so it seems opportune for us to reflect on this systematically. And what better time to do this than through Lent, the period of renewal and hope? Last Sunday, we explored how the experience of hope arises from our needs, of how it is connected to the hungers in our hearts, and we touched upon the power when we come together in shared hope. This week, I want to reflect upon hope as the doorway into the future.
The great spiritual writer of the 20th century, the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton once provocatively lamented in his journal, The Sign of Jonas, the perpetuation of building churches in a Gothic style as an implicit confession of atheism.[1] He interpreted the practice as a declaration that God is dead, that God no longer belongs to our age, but only to a past one. If God were truly living would not religious architecture draw from the insights and creativity of the current age? He wrote that observation in the 1950s. However, in his very last journals in 1965, A Vow of Conversation, Merton continued with this observation by quoting from Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, saying, “[To be free] is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future.” To this he made comment, “Simply to enclose oneself ‘in the given’ is no glory to God. It is an evasion of life and of growth, a hiding your light under a bushel.”[2]
We mentioned on Ash Wednesday that Pope Francis has remarked that the poor today are those who are afraid of the future.[3] They are those trapped in the past at worst, or at best, in the present. But for the Christian, the future is given us as a relentless invitation, and not even death negates this. There is always a future, always the possibility of a new beginning. That is not to say that we are not concerned about the future, that the future does not come to greet us with very real questions that can make us anxious at times. It does mean, however, that we are never defined by our concerns. There is something more at work, something bigger at work, something beyond what occupies our attention. In the words of the first President of the Czech Republic, Václav Havel, “hope is not the belief that something has a positive outcome, but the certainty that something makes sense, however, it ends up.”[4] Because of what we celebrate each Easter – the triumph of life over death, the victory of presence over absence – hope now is always possible no matter what stone we come across in our path.
All this opens for us a space. It is the space of ‘the more.’ According to the theologian, Jürgen Moltmann, in “Kabbalistic Jewish tradition one of God’s secret names is MAKOM, the wide space.”[5] God is this wide-open space in which new and hitherto unsuspected expectations about life are awakened. “You have set my feet in a broad place”, as we read in Psalm 31. Similarly, Fr Paulus Budi Kleden, the General Superior of the Divine Word Missionaries, preached several years ago, “Hope is open spaces; hope opens up prospects, hope dares the uncertain, and the unknown. Those who hope have the courage to leave and take risks. Love makes love possible.”
We are those, then, who are enabled to stretch out into new horizons, “stretching out to what is ahead, [always with] a readiness for a fresh start.”[6] We are not imprisoned in the given. This is the source of Christian possibility and the way that we can enter the marvellous aspiration of the Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard – even if tragically he could not personally realize it: “If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.”[7]
This, in turn, means we are those who live our life in watchfulness. We are those, in Moltmann’s words, who no longer “pray with closed eyes, but [now rather], messianically, with eyes wide open for God’s future in the world. Christian faith is not blind trust. It is the wakeful expectation of God which draws us in all our senses.” He goes on to illustrate that indeed this was how the first Christians prayed “standing, looking up, with arms outstretched, and eyes wide open, ready to walk or to leap forward. We can see this from the pictures in the catacombs in Rome. Their posture reflects tense expectation, not quiet heart searching. It says . . . We are on the watch, in expectation of the One who is coming . . .[8] And, our watchfulness leads us, as Moltmann suggests, to “expect the presence of God in everything I meet and everything I do. . . What does God have in mind for me? What does God expect of me? What is he saying to me through the things that are happening in my world, and what is my response?”[9] As he remarks, “When we wake up in the morning , we expect a new day; and in the same way, the waking which springs from prayer to God also leads us to the expectation of God in the life we experience. I wake up, and open all my senses for life – for the fulfillments and the disappointments, for what is painful as for what gives joy.”[10] At the heart of these expectations lies a hope about the future – that, indeed, there is a future.
It is the Spirit, then, who leads us into ever new horizons. It is the Spirit which animates the recognition that things can be different, who informs our dreams and sets ablaze our hope. And when we are able to create even a moment in which people can imagine a better future, when we can transform the absence of hope into the exercise of hope and allow our self and others to dream once again, in some small way we mirror the life of the Resurrection.
As Jürgen Moltmann concludes, “We wait and hasten, we hope and endure, we pray and watch, we are both patient and curious. That makes the Christian life exciting and alive.”[11]
[1] Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas, (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953), journal entry 20 December 1951.
[2] Thomas Merton, A Vow of Conversation: Journals 1964-1965, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1988), 24.
[3] See Pope Francis, Video Message on the Occasion of the TED conference in Vancouver, Canada (26 April 2017) https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2017/documents/papa-francesco_20170426_videomessaggio-ted-2017.html
[4] Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, (1986).
[5] Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A universal affirmation, translated by Margaret Kohl, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 43.
[6] Jürgen Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning: the life of hope, translated by Margaret Kohl, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004), 87.
[7] Søren Kierkegaard, “Either/Or, A Fragment of Life,” in The Essential Kierkegaard, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press), 45.
[8] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 83-84.
[9] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 85.
[10] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 84-85.
[11] Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 88.
