Fourth Sunday of Lent – 30 March 2025 – Fourth Reflection on Hope: Christian hope as the assertion of the absurdity of evil.
In this Year of Jubilee, from the beginning of our season of Lent, we have been reflecting on the focal theme of the Jubilee – hope. We began by reflecting on how hope rises from those situations of limit in our life. We come across a limit, as it were, and hope takes us beyond this into something beyond that limit. In this way, hope is linked to our hungers, our needs. And yet, secondly, we reflected on that we would not hope if we did not have a sense of future, that there was a future. We hope to the extent that we believe there is a future. And who guarantees that future? This was the subject of our third reflection. Jesus is the source of our hope, because in him, the first born from the dead, we know we have a future. He is the One whom, through the power of his Resurrection, opens for us a new world, a new way of being.
This, then, leads us to recognise the distinctive Christian nature of hope.
Our hope as Christians is inextricably built on our faith. We hope because we have faith. We are those who believe that a Promise has been made to us. It was a promise first given by God to his chosen people, the people of the Old Testament. In the covenant that God established with his people, God promises Abraham that he will be the father of a great nation. It is a promise that is continuously re-iterated to those that follow, to Moses, to David, to the prophets (see Gen 12:2-3; 13:15; Ex 6:5-8; Is. 65:17). The people of the Old Testament live in the hope that the promise will be fulfilled. The people live by that hope. And there emerges a very particular school of Jewish spirituality called the anawim: they are those who continue to believe in the Promise and live with its hope even in the face of everything that would deny it. And many are the occasions where the Promise seems to have been thwarted. The people are sold into slavery in Egypt, the people are exiled to Babylon, the people are overwhelmed by the Romans. And yet the faithful of Isreal, keep believing, keep trusting, keep hoping. At the time of Jesus, the people of Nazareth were immersed into this school – these are the poor of Yahweh who keep their gaze on what is to come even though they live in a situation that would seem to be without hope. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the most beautiful example of this people, as is Joseph, the shepherds to whom the birth of Jesus is announced, and Anna and Simeon the two figures in the Temple of Jerusalem about whom we read in the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke. Simeon we read, “was righteous and devout, waiting for God to comfort Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. He had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.” (Lk 2: 25-26).
The Book of Psalms is known as the prayer book of the anawim. It is the prayer book, par excellence, of hope. In this liturgy of hope, we touch upon what Metz terms that “mysticism of suffering unto God.” We cry out to God in the midst of our suffering with its full force, and yet at the same time believing. As Metz writes, “it is less a song of the soul, more a loud crying out from the depths – and not a vague, undirected wailing, but a focused crying-out-to . . . What occurs in this language is not the repression but rather the acceptance of fear, mourning and pain; it is deeply rooted in the figure of the night, the experience of the soul’s demise.” And still it trusts. Above all it is the prayer of Jesus himself on the Cross, the One who in the midst of his agony can cry out, “My God, my God why have you abandoned me”, and yet surrender in trust, “Into your hands I commend my spirit” and who thus opens for our world the imagined possibility of a life stronger than death.
Each of us is drawn into that awful moment of Jesus. We too are called to hope in the midst of darkness because we believe, like Jesus, that God will be true to his Promise, that in the end the Promise will be fulfilled, even though everything seems to announce the opposite. Christian hope breathes on the irrevocable nature of this Promise. It is the confidence (faith) that the Promise we have been given in Christ’s Resurrection cannot be forever frustrated. We are those who believe that Christ has risen from the dead, that the victory has been won, that the force of death has been overcome, that goodness is stronger than evil. We stake our lives on this conviction. We live by the words of St Paul:
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor power, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Rom 8: 35-39)
And this changes the way in which we see our life and changes the way in which we do things. It is the faith that opens for us new possibility even in the midst of what might be extraordinary limitation and before what at first might seem hopeless. The Promise we have been given, and the hope that springs ever new from this faith, enables us to celebrate even in the face of frustration, distortion or limitation.
This, then, is the paradox of genuine Christian hope. It is most keenly experienced in the face of all that would seem to deny it. Christian hope, therefore, is exercised precisely in the midst of evil: it is the projection of the Promise, given and received, over the absurdity of evil. St. Paul put it this way, “Affliction makes for endurance, and endurance for tested virtue, and tested virtue for hope. And this hope will not leave us disappointed” (Rom 5:3-5).
Let me give you an example of what I mean by this. Many years ago, I worked with a group of Anglican priests helping them to reflect on their ministry. One of them was the police chaplain in Melbourne. I shall never forget one of the stories he shared. A young girl had been murdered. When the whereabouts of her body was finally disclosed, it was discovered that it was in the Melbourne tip. After her body was retrieved, her distraught family made the astonishing decision that they wished to go to the place where her body was discovered. They asked the Anglican chaplain to go with them. We can imagine the scene: this noisy, dusty, dirty, smelly, vast landscape of rubbish. And in the midst of this horrible dystopian world of Melbourne’s rubbish tip, the family knelt to pray for their daughter and for the one who had murdered her. They lit a candle. That flame was so fragile, and yet it was their Christian protest against the enormous ugliness of the situation. And in that moment that flickering flame represented a power stronger than the darkness all around them. And it gave a powerful example of the truth that all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle, no matter how flickering it may be.
When we can find the courage to light our own candle, so to speak, in the face of the evil we may encounter; when we can find the courage to say deep within ourselves that the evil we face is not the final story; when we can find the courage before the evil which we encounter to whisper in our hearts Christ is Risen, evil you have no power, the victory has already been won, then most truly have we become people of Hope.
