Abstract
Keeping Faith with Hope
Bill Clinton often said he ‘was born in a place called Hope’. He was, literally. He first saw the light of day in a little town called Hope, Arkansas. Bill made his birthplace a metaphor for his philosophy of life. Through difficulties and good fortune, he eventually became President of the USA.
As an Irishman, I will always be grateful that Bill and Hilary Clinton kept faith with the people of hope in Northern Ireland. I mean those who, for some thirty years, lived defiantly in a fog of violence, resisting pervading hopelessness. In the end, the Good Friday Agreement gave hope its reward: a constitutional framework that all stake holders in the conflict could buy into. Hope allied itself with compromise—not an easy thing to do—for the good of all. It is not a perfect peace, but one that stumbles on with hope at its heart.
The lectionary lessons speak of hope in varied circumstances. David hopes to build a house for the Lord; Jeremiah hopes for the sweeping aside of spiritually blind, self-serving leaders; Paul hopes for a new humanity, a family of God where ancient divisions and hatreds are no more. In the gospel, crowds scramble to reach Jesus, hoping for healing from sickness and relief from hunger. In the Bible, as in life, it is often difficult circumstances that drive the human spirit in the direction of hope. I recall an adage from Mr Cahill, my minister from yester year: desperation leads to inspiration.
A peculiarity of biblical hope is that it often discounts good intentions. King David, for instance, had plans to build a grand house, a Temple for God. It emerged, however, that God at that juncture in history was content with a tent and tabernacle for his sacred presence. David’s good intention was returned with a ‘No, thank you!’ David’s grand idea would have to wait for another time, for another person, for God’s call. The shape of the future belonged to God, not to David’s well-meaning scheme.
One of the challenges in life is to discern the difference between true and false hope. I think in all religious traditions, the first requirement for discernment is submission to God. After submission, discernment may take some time and entail many false starts, dead ends, and diversions. Though the Church has been slow to admit it, there is trial and error on the spiritual journey. Our personal histories, as our institutional histories, are morally checkered. The chronicles of history show that the Church has erred most when most self-assured. The arbitrary placing of children of aboriginal peoples in Christian residential schools, the taking of children from their birth mothers and placing them for adoption, the incarceration of unmarried mothers in Magdalen laundries—these are just some of the many black marks on the Church’s record. Self-assured optimism did great harm to the powerless and vulnerable, the hurting kindred of the crucified One. A chastening voice, a Nathan, is often needed to draw humans back from the abyss of dangerous presumption.
Jeremiah ‘calls out’ false shepherds—those who control institutions and obscure and obstruct the ways of God. His words were not welcome. Jeremiah is the classic prophet of doom. Only a remnant will survive, but that will suffice. The remnant will be seed for another time. Now, as then, the authentic hope of the prophet is considered eccentric by conventional wisdom, misunderstood by the crowds, and feared by vested interests.
Paul introduces a novel hope: a new humanity, incorporating Jew and gentile; by implication, all races. A new sort of togetherness, koinonia, existed in the small communities of believers he visited and served. Paul dreamed that this embryonic community could be ‘rolled out’ across the known world. It was a big idea, a noble thought. As the centuries unfolded, however, Paul’s dream morphed into ‘one shoe fits all’ institutional religion. Creed and conformity became the measure of togetherness and Jesus’ friendship with sinners narrowed into an imperative to convert the unbeliever.
How different in the gospels! Jesus marvelled at the untutored faith of a Canaanite woman; he admired the unquestioning trust of a Roman centurion; he saw exemplary gratitude in a Samaritan leper. Jesus received kindness from a Samaritan woman, passing no judgement on her transgression of moral conventions. An attitude of friendship, without ulterior motive, marked the life of our Lord. The late Jonathan Sacks called for religions to embrace the dignity of difference. Jesus was an early day practitioner. He set no premium on sameness.
The most prevalent form of hope in our Western world is secular in orientation, a belief in human progression without a God hypothesis. The expectation that other planets will be colonised, that artificial intelligence will fill the gaps in human knowledge: these add imaginative power to the myth of perpetual progress and scientific salvation. A Victorian critic of that very Victorian myth was Thomas Hardy, a mild agnostic. His poem Christmas 1924 has poignant lines:
After two thousand years of mass
We have got as far as poison gas.
Hardy, reacting to the horrors of industrialised warfare, felt confidence in human progress had over-reached itself. Bewildered he looked and listened for signs of hope, transcendent and divine. Hardy loved Church music and architecture and found comfort in ritual. It was in nature, however, that on occasion he heard song of hope: elusive yet tangible. On a cold winter day, the full-throated song of a Darkling Thrush intimated to his poetic imagination ‘Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware.’ As with Hardy, many have heard hope whisper in their souls at times of loss, both personal and cultural.
In today’s gospel, crowds rush on foot and people beg to touch the fringe of the garments Jesus wore. He had compassion on them, he fed them, and he healed them. As Christians, we are both like Jesus and unlike him. We wish on the one hand to do the things he did; but on the other, we do not have his extraordinary powers and gifts. We can, nevertheless, bring compassion, care, and consolation to the hurting in our circles of acquaintance. That way we are, in some sense, the body of Christ in the world today. And those we care for are his body, too. The needy, we ourselves, and Jesus are One humanity.
‘I come from a place called Hope’, said Bill Clinton. Every Christian comes from a place called hope and travels to a place where hopes become reality. This is not human optimism; it is a miracle of grace.