Hope

This was a talk presented at a Young Adult's retreat at St Saviour's Cathedral on 2025-03-29. The retreat was titled, "Hope in Prayer" with my reflection called to focus and explore hope.

Soon after being asked to reflect on hope I realised that my perception of hope is very limited. I immediately recognised that I understood hope is a modern may, maybe a Spiritual way. Hope for me I remember from periods of crisis; however, hope is uplifted in the Christian experience. At the end of the famous love chapter of 1 Corinthians Paul states, "Now these three remain, Faith, Hope and Love..." and rightly so Paul uplifts love as the greatest, but hope is part of this grand comparison.^[1]

Upholding Faith, Hope and Love together; I can describe Faith to a certain point: Faith in Christ, the work of Christ, Journey of Faith, Church's faith, creeds, theology, we aren't blinded by faith as it can be seen logically and understood while also noting that we can walk by faith and not by sight. Love, I fully understand I can't describe: it is a defining aspect of God as Trinity, the immanent love in the Trinity is beyond us, yet we are called into the overflowing of this love. We experience love in relationships with others and also of course God. But hope...

I was pretty happy when I started my research and found I wasn't the only one. N. T. Wright suggests

"Most people... - including many Christians - Don't know what the ultimate Christian hope really is. Most people - again, sadly including many Christians - don't expect Christians to have much to say about hope within the present world. Most people don't imagine these two could have anything to do with each other."^[2]

Have we lost our concept of hope? Has hope shifted to a mere sustainer in crisis? surely we are called to more then just creatures in crisis. As the hope in crisis is familiar we should start our exploration there.

Hope in Crisis

When I speak of crisis, I speak of: sleepless nights, paint in our hearts, unexpected misadventures, anxiety taking breath away, stress that can cause fainting, depression that feels like an anvil on your chest. These are all unnatural thieves.

Unnatural is not to be confused with "not okay". It is okay to feel like this in a world that has fallen, a world that is in an unnatural state beyond it's good creation. Mental health is a common occurrence and in the past five years awareness has only grown. We also know that the one with anxiety does not celebrate the anxiety itself, the same for the one with depression. They celebrate hopeful breakthroughs, calmer minds and brighter days. Hope allows it to be okay in the specific moment and I certainly remember this on my darkest days.

These moments of crisis may be long yet others can be short but still significant. The death of someone close should hurt. The death of a friendship or a relationship also hurts. Moments of disaster, fire, flood, storms, medical emergencies all produce rightful fear and anxiety, hurting and straining us.

In these moments we see hope work. Hope in the good nature of creation, in the natural. Hope becomes the dull light. Though, for Christians there is so much more. Our critical point as Christian is non-surprisingly, Jesus, that he has died for us. Even without grasping the idea until we look back, it is Jesus who is with us in all these moments. Jesus gives us hope.

Embodiment of Hope

Hope for Christians is an embodied concept found in the death and resurrection of Christ. For a Christian our after-life views are incomplete and unclear which is rightfully so as we lack the ability to truly understand things. Our weakness comes as we fill the gaps with non-scriptural concepts, a big one is the though of going to heaven.

Within our Christian concepts we are shown a resurrected body that experiences no decay; this is instead of a spiritual/heavenly body which is ethereal and non-physical. We see Jesus with a resurrected body, a physical body. Easter is on the horizon and it is Easter that points us to the resurrection as we see in all four of the Gospels.^[3] All the four gospels uplift the resurrected body of Christ. Christology, upholds a resurrected fully human, fully divine Christ where the human body did not pass away.

The Gospels do not shy away from hope in a crisis in these stories either. Luke shows us Peter's reaction. Peter had rejected Jesus, he thought he killed the relationship before Jesus had died. He would have been in heightened anguish and has the most to gain if the women's story is true that Jesus has been raised from the dead. The relationship that he had rejected might be able to be alive. Desperate for light, feeling hopeless he needs the resurrection to be true.

Luke 24.1-12

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.’ Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

The resurrection stories should shift our views of what the after-life could be. Do you think of your own body resurrected? Give yourself a moment now to breath slowly. Can you see your lungs breathing as part of the resurrected body? As long as your respiratory system is healthy the feeling of air rushing into your nose and down your throat, filling your lungs is a good feeling. Do you look at your fingerprints, signs of your individual identity and think about that in terms of the resurrection? The identity of the resurrected body, though different, is consistent with you.

We aren't called to be in the clouds but rather called to be on Earth. Earth in a new creation, a resurrected relationship of Heaven and Earth as it was before the fall. It is through faith that we can believe we are beings of the resurrection and love proves it through the death and resurrection of our saviour, Jesus Christ.

The Resurrected Hope is Now

In our Anglican Communion service we all say, "Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again."^[4] I don't expect in this context that people will stop seeing death as an end because it is an end. The doubt of resurrection can easily cloud our vision; we all are called to hold true to the statement "Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again." In this we understand that we are in the middle and by faith we recognise that Jesus is Risen. This faith then builds the foundation that we will rise again when he comes.

Despair and anguish found in crisis are not triggers for our Christian Hope because it is always active. We all live in an overflow of love. We all look to our faith but our actual life and how we share our story is through hope. Hope is what drives us to search for justice and beauty in the world even when our fallen world doesn't show it. Justice and Beauty is found in the resurrection of Christ and our hope and faith to share in it.^[5]

Hope calls us to pray, in all times and in all ways. It empowers us to be Christ's risen light for others. Hope calls us to live resurrected lives today, not merely when Jesus comes again. The celebration of Easter is active every day and God's work is active every day. Hope bridges us to Easter always! The call that Christ is risen and when he comes again we can rise too. It is how we live as Christians through faith and in love.

Today, as we explore hope in Prayer, we do every step in faith. In between the steps, the air we walk through is and will always remain drenched in hope.

Prayer

We look to your Father, we look to your Jesus, we look to you Spirit, give us a space to be at peace, explore Hope and be at love with your God, Trinity, three in one.

Endnotes