Explorations in Hope #1

²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Romans 8:24-25)

Hope is our eager expectation and desire for the future. Like a child counting down to Christmas, hope ‘can’t wait’ for what has not yet happened; it is never far from our thoughts, and it becomes the lens that colours everything we do. Hope is seen in the excited anticipation that flows out of a child’s heart as they get ready for a special adventure or a special treat (as the Newlings like to call them, anyway!). It is hope’s enthusiasm for the future that makes the mundane manageable, and the unbearable bearable.

Hope, then, although it is fundamentally future oriented, is determinative of the present. As we look forward to where (we think) we are going, hope shapes our decisions, our demeanour, and our dialogue as we act in accordance with our expectations of the future. In the hope spoken of in Romans 8:24-25, for instance, it fosters ‘patient waiting’ in us. Hope does not foster forgetfulness about what is to come, nor does it promote a ‘putting it out of one’s mind’ attitude towards the future. Hope consciously yearns for the future to come.

As much as hope is determinative of our lives in the ‘here and now’, the nature of hope is such that it preserves what we hope for (the ‘object’ of our hope) as a good thing in and of itself. To reduce the value of hope simply to its pragmatic effects in the present (it helps me to live life better, etc) is to trivialise our hope. For instance, when we consider the future God has promised us, no amount of positive effects in the present can overshadow the goodness of the future in store for us. In other words, even if the Christian hope had no ‘here and now’ effects, it would still be an entirely wonderful and glorious thing to fix our eyes upon. If the only value we can see in hope is its pragmatic value (how it makes life ‘work’ now), we’ve not understood the Christian hope at all.

Hope, however, is not the only ‘future expectation that shapes the present’ in this endarkened world. Hope, which desires the future, can crumple before these other ‘future-oriented’ mindsets. Anxiety worries for the future, while dread fears the future itself. Grief may mourn a future that can never be, and despair cannot see a future at all. Of course, in our murky experience, hope and anxiety can comingle – as we wait for test results, for instance. For some of us, we can also pre-emptively comingle grief and despair with our hope and anxiety, where we experience the feelings of mourning and hopelessness before we know the outcome of a meeting or test result. More usually, despair is what kicks in when our hopes are proven false: our hopes are shattered and we cannot see a way forward.

Furthermore, and despite all the potential goodness of hope, hope is for many of us something we have become wary of. What is so abundantly seen in children is often so much harder to see in adults. Many people suppress their hopes because they have learnt the hard way – consciously or not – that it is ‘safer’ not to hope. There are two broad reasons for this.

First, we can learn to be wary of hope because we have come to realise that the objects of our hopes don’t prove very satisfying. This is, perhaps, most easily seen again in children: the yearning for weeks-on-end for that special toy at Christmas, only for it to be forgotten by New Year? For the box to be of more lasting excitement than the toy that was hoped for? The object of our hopes can sometimes be so fleeting, so unfulfilling, that they don’t satisfy (and, for another day, it would be worth exploring the relationship between hope, contentment, greed and envy).

Second, we can become wary of hope because we so often see our hopes flounder in failure or non-fulfilment. What we longed for doesn’t come to pass, or what we long for is too fragile or uncertain, and the feelings that go with that aren’t worth bearing with: the anxiety, the grief, the despair from before. For some, it becomes safer to not think of the future at all than to risk encountering such emotional consequences. Whether through fear of the future or ignorance of it, the riches of this present life can provide a ‘future-free’ existence for many.

In short, we can become disappointed with hope because we are too familiar with disappointment, both in the object of our hopes, and in the uncertainty of the future. How, then, in this context, do we cultivate the Christian hope in our lives? How do we foster a longing and desire for the fulfilment of God’s promises?

The aim of this [intermittent] series is to provide some reflections on the grounds of the Christian hope (on what basis we can be confident of our hope). In a world filled with uncertain hopes and uncertain futures, of failed dreams and unfulfilled expectations, how do we learn to be confident in the Christian hope?

If the Christian hope is to be cultivated in our lives, we need to dwell both on the glory of the grounds of our hope and on the glory of the object of our hope. That is, we’ll only grow in our longing for the Christian future if we actually fix our eyes on it; but we’ll only grow in the confidence of our hope if we fix our eyes on the reasons why we can have such hope at all. The extent to which we embrace and permit ourselves to be ‘enthralled’ by the Christian future depends on both of these factors.

Nevertheless, you’ll have to forgive that this short series will not spend so much time thinking about the object of our hope. I have written some thoughts about that previously in an article about ‘heaven’ and the new creation which you can find over at The Briefing. In the next post in this series, however, we’ll move on to think further about the ‘problem’ we face with certainty and fulfilment.