Third Sunday of Lent – 23 March 2025 – Third Reflection on Hope in the Year of Jubilee: Christ, the Source of our Hope
Over each Sunday in the Season of Lent in this Year of Jubilee we have reflecting on the nature of Hope which is the focal theme for the celebration. We began our reflection thinking about how hope rises in our hearts from our hungers, from our needs. Last week, we spoke of how our sense of hope is premised on our belief that there is a future. We only have hope in our hearts if we believe there is a future; no future no hope. And so, hope opens spaces for us to move into the future.
In this third reflection, we come to ask in whom can we place our hope? In other words, who gives us confidence that there is a future? This is where we consider the emergence of messiahs – figures who promise a new age of possibility and opportunity, freedom from the current experience of stagnation or entrapment. Of course, many have assumed this significance in history – individuals with strength of ideology and resources to offer a better future for people. And not only in history, but in our own time as well – though history itself demonstrates that the hopes and expectations of the people cannot be fulfilled, and the messiah disappears almost as quickly as they appeared.
Indeed, as the Christian people we are heir to those, themselves, who had longed for a Messiah. For centuries, the people of the Old Testament ardently hoped for someone who would deliver them from their oppression and who would re-establish the Kingdom of David, one who would finally give them sovereignty and security.
There comes a time in their history when someone does appear with such a possibility, though not in the way long anticipated. His name is Jesus: born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, followed in Galilee, and arrested and executed in Jerusalem. Was he, too, like any other messiah whose crusade died as quickly as it emerged?
Yet, for us as the followers of this first century Palestinian rabbi, it was not the end of the story. For his first followers had the audacity to proclaim the astonishing assertion that he was not dead, but alive – that in his death the most remarkable event manifested itself: his Resurrection. Resurrection of course is not resuscitation. We do not believe that Jesus was resuscitated from the dead. We are those who believe, based on those first followers experience, that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. And this is much more marvelous event than mere resuscitation. It means that the life of Jesus has burst forth from the confine of death and broken the shackles of time and space and is something present to us now through the body that bears his risen life to us, the body of his friends together, the Church. As the people who proclaim these five simple words, “Jesus rose from the dead” – we have staked our life on this claim, for as St Paul wrote to the people of Corinth, “if Christ has not risen from the dead, our faith is in vain.” It is futile. (1 Cor 15: 12-19).
Indeed, our bold assertion is not simply even a profession about Jesus himself; it is equally a profession about ourselves. We are those who proclaim that Jesus Christ is the first born from the dead (Col 1:18), the second Adam (1 Cor 15: 45), and in him we see our own destiny: the transformation of our own bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.(Philippians 3:20). This is our hope – our hope that we will share in the same destiny accomplished in Christ Jesus himself by the power of God who is calling us all into a new existence, a restored world, a world in which alienation has been overcome and communion becomes the new politic. We call it by a simple word, heaven.
And yet we believe that heaven is not simply a future reality. We are those who believe Christ has come, Christ will come, and that Christ is already coming. Subsequently, we are those entrusted to bring heaven to earth, so to speak, through our own commitment to that new order of relationship inaugurated by Jesus which he calls the Kingdom of God. As we hope for this Kingdom, we work for this Kingdom, constantly on the watch for the ways to transform shame into dignity, exclusion into embrace, oppression into freedom. We can do this in grand ways by publicly voicing our opposition to legislation that may be antithetical to the vision of life given us by Jesus, right through to a smile to someone who is distressed.
As followers of Jesus, we are disciples of the Kingdom he preaches. And he teaches us to pray with hearts full of hope for this kingdom. “Our Father who art in heaven, thy kingdom come,” we pray constantly. We hope for the Kingdom he has inaugurated. Indeed, at every Mass following the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, “As we await the blessed hope, and the coming of your Kingdom.” This we pray with our children every Sunday morning in the Eucharistic Prayer that has been composed for them: “Jesus now lives with you in glory, but he is also here on earth amongst us, and one day he will come again in glory and then there will be no more suffering, no more tears, no more sadness.” How we long for this world! How much we hope for this world!
Jesus is the one who has opened for us the future through his Resurrection, but not just any future. He has opened for us a very particular future – a new world. And it is this world for which we most deeply hope as his followers. It is this hope that makes us agents of social change in our world today. Why would we be such agents, if we were not those who are living by a hope for a better world?
As Christians, we are a people of both memory and hope. We remember Jesus, his life, his death and resurrection – especially here at the Eucharist. Our memory of him grounds us, it orients us. But it also fills our hearts with hope. Where he has gone before us, we, too, are to follow. A new world, a better world, a different world is possible. Our memory sustains us, but our hope goads us. We do not accept the present but stretch always out into a new future, the future of God’s Kingdom. For this we most deeply hope.
