before them in stores, catalogs, and computers, to the blinking lights in the windows, and on the calculators of the merchants, there does seem to be a whole lot of hoping going around in these pre-Christmas days.
And, to be completely fair, it is not all selfish, acquisitive, or materialistic hoping that we see. There is something about this season—be it the music, the lights and decorations, the messages and packages, fond memories evoked—that can bring out in even the most worn-down and worn-out of us the hope for better times, for a more trusting, welcoming way of life. For so many of us these weeks before Christmas become all wrapped up with hope.
It is only when we stop to ask, “but what kind of hope is this, just what manner of hoping are we dealing with here?” that questions, significant questions, begin to arise. This word “hope” finds its origins, so the scholars suggest, in an Anglo-Saxon root, a root that signifies “the opening of the eyes.” But far too much of what is called “hope” nowadays seems to be based on the opposite of this, not the opening, but the deliberate closing of the eyes. “Hope is a tease,” as the Dowager Marchioness of Grantham—Maggie Smith’s character—remarks on Downton Abbey, “ . . . a tease to prevent us from accepting reality.”
It seems true to say that the only way many of us can even hope to hope today is by closing our eyes tight against a sad series of harsh realities—realities of a cruel world one cannot help but glimpse, right before the Christmas TV specials, on the nightly news. Hope, for many folk, in other words, is a rosy-colored-spectacles experience, a therapeutic luxury, to be indulged in only upon certain limited occasions. While in the background, in today’s culture—which is not so much a Culture of Disbelief, as one recent writer described it, as it is a Culture of Disappointment, of Disillusionment—there lingers that twenty-first century, sophisticated cynicism, the realization that, as some wag once put it, “The lion may well lie down with the lamb, but that lamb is not going to get much sleep.” Or as Archy, resident cockroach at the New York Sun, typed to his editor, Don Marquis the poet:
the only way boss
to keep hope in the world
is to keep changing its
population frequently
Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, expressed all of this, in elegant phrases, for an earlier generation:
The Worldly Hope men set their hearts upon
Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon,
Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face
Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.1
I was tempted to title this meditation, “A Shocking Hope,” because, in studying the Scriptures on this theme—and these Scriptures (particularly the New Testament) are filled with references to hope—I discover a vastly different picture. There is, in fact, very little of what today one might call “optimism” in the Bible, if there is any at all. The people who shaped these holy books, who compiled these ancient, living manuscripts within the context of their own lives, their daily wrestling with faith and fear, were not in any position to indulge in that kind of hoping. They usually had very little going for them, practically nothing really to build hope upon. They were among the earliest of Christians, the very fact of whose faith meant that they were living in the constant shadow of public denunciation, imprisonment, trial, and terrifying death. There was no way, no matter how they might have wanted to, to close their eyes to these grim realities that stared them in the face. They were just too close for that kind of comfort.
And so one finds here a different, an alternative kind of hope. Look again at how Paul described it in Romans:
. . . we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.
“Suffering . . . endurance . . . character . . . hope.” That’s the route hope followed for Paul, that’s the family tree of this New Testament type of hoping: from suffering, through endurance, into character, and then, finally, achieving hope. This is a hope which, far from shutting its eyes, far from ignoring or fleeing from suffering, springs directly from the heart of anguish and pain; a hope which, far from any passing mood or momentary sentiment, any blind and easy optimism, is born within the soul that has endured, and in endurance has gained that—so rare—attribute of these times, character. And character produces hope.
On a wall in the darkest, deepest crypt of Germany’s Cologne Cathedral there are words traced by a trembling, yet still hopeful hand. Seven Jews lay hidden there during the darkest days of World War II, seven children of Father Abraham, their pitiful bundles of possessions gathered round them, concealed through the courage and faith of the Archbishop of Cologne. And sometime in the night, those darkest hours of human desolation and despair, one of them reached out and scratched upon that wall these words, not of optimism—that would be absurd, if not obscene in such circumstances—these words of genuine and authentic hope:
I believe in the dawn, even though it be dark.
I believe in God, even though He be silent.
This hope that arises from suffering, this miraculous hope born in the deepest of darkness . . . a shocking hope indeed among these merry marketing days of “Ho, Ho, Ho!” and holiday cheer. A bit of a downer, to be completely honest, this must seem for many today, considering the sought-after spirit of this season. But a hope, nevertheless, that folk can see, actually see with their eyes wide open, and therefore a hope that might last beyond the unwrapping of the last Christmas package, the popping of the final New Year cork. Paul described it as the hope that does not—as so many of these present passing hopes will do—disappoint us.
What is it like then, this shocking hope, this biblical hope, this hope that grows from suffering, through endurance, to character, and then blossoms into full-fledged bloom? The Hebrew word for hope has the root meaning of “to twist or twine” and is related to the word kivin, the word for a spiderweb. So much of our hoping has this spiderweb quality to it, this quality of surprising strength out of seeming weakness, of stunning beauty woven from the tiny, apparently insignificant strands of daily living. We live in, we live by, an interwoven network of hopes, each one lending strength to the others, and all of them, however fragile, somehow supporting us, leading us into the future.
I tramped the hills above my Scottish hometown several years ago. It was a chill but bright November morning with the northern sun barely rising above the trees. My mother was desperately ill, dying, as I had suspected was the case. But she was to come to church that Sunday, and I, home from America on a farewell visit, was to be the preacher. I was grappling for the words, words to preach the Gospel in a way that would speak to her, and to all who heard, about this gift, this experience, we Christians call hope. And then I saw it, glimpsed and knew the glory all about me. The grassy pasture field on my right hand was caught and held, illuminated at a curious angle, by that low-on-the-horizon winter sun. A breeze, chill but somehow playful, blew across the close-cropped surface of the turf. And there I glimpsed an astonishing spectacle, a shining, silken, network of microscopically thin spiderwebs all linking blade-to-blade-to-blade of grass. There must have been thousands upon thousands of them, forming a shimmering, gossamer blanket all across that ordinary/heavenly meadow, and moving, lifting, waving lightly in the wind. I sat beside the hedgerow spellbound. I’d never seen such a thing, never even guessed such things existed. And as I sat and watched I found a healing, and a hope renewed, a magic, in the best and holiest sense of that word, a firm and steady reassurance that glory—yes, the glory of the Lord—shall be revealed. And that our hope is not, will not ever
