What Does Our Hope Consist In? Series

Monday of 2nd week in Advent

What was the hope of the man with the paralyzed limbs? What was the hope of the men who in their faith and love let him down into the room where Jesus was? At first glance, the only thing they seemed to want was a healing touch, a friend once more able to walk. But Jesus looked into the heart of the man, and the heart of the matter, and gave him what he really needed first—forgiveness. Then, because the scribes and Pharisees accused him of blasphemy—the sin against the Holy Spirit—Jesus gave the man what he thought he needed, and gave everyone the witness of the truth: Jesus forgives sins, so also today the Church, acting in his place, can by the Holy Spirit's working, forgive sins.

We are tempted when we hear the word of God to treat it as mere information, as the Pope Benedict wrote, the communication of a hitherto unknown content. But that is not what we need. Oh, no, in this day of information overload, the last thing we need is more content for our minds to process. Rather, the Christian message, the good news, is performative. That means that the Gospel is not only information, it is news that makes things happen and that changes lives. The Gospel throws open the dark door of time and empowers us to look with confidence beyond our mortal life, because the Gospel gives us a new life.

Pope Benedict goes on—what does our hope consist in? It is redemption, redemption from a hopeless condition. Before our encounter with Christ, and outside our encounter with Christ, if we should sin, we are without hope because we are without Emmanuel. Remember that Emmanuel means “God is with us.” Without God in the world we have no hope. When we come to know God as a true and present and living reality in our lives, we receive the gift of hope. Hope is that theological virtue that enables us to know that after a life lived in charity, we will be taken up into the kingdom of God, truly alive in the Son of God.

For folks who have lived their whole lives in the presence of Christ’s Church, we have forgotten what it means to have no hope. By reading the lives of saints converted to Christ, we can know how they grew from hopelessness to hope, and from despair to a new life. They discovered that their faith in Christ and union with the Church felt like the miraculous entry into a garden of life. As the psalmist says, “Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky. Yea, the LORD will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.”

This is a vision worth sharing. If everyone you know lived with that kind of Christian hope, would not the whole world be able to get it? It's free, after all, for the asking. God will never turn down a sincere request for grace. As Isaiah told us, in such a renewed civilization, those who are fearful of heart would believe the prophetic words, "Be strong, fear not! Behold, your God will come with vengeance, with the recompense of God. He will come and save you." They would experience a renewed world even before death. Yes, that is a vision worth sharing with everyone we know.