Christian hope,the greatest expectation

We hope for a multitude of things. We hope our business will thrive. We hope one day to own a mansion in Alabang. That’s for the ambitious, the go-getter, the social climber who hopes one day to be numbered among the elite, to be a celebrity, to be featured in our society pages. There is the hope of the lowly at least to be able to rise even a degree above the squatter status, to be able to eat not just a brunch of lugaw in the morning and camote dug from a sidewalk patch in the evening but no matter how cheap at least rice and some viand three times a day. There is the hope among our out-of-school youth to take even some vocational course or to get a scholarship from some social institution; the hope for opportunities of livelihood in greener pastures even in far-off places outside the country. There is still the hope of our local domestic helpers to be accepted in Japan as japayukis. Even our professionals, doctors for instance study nursing in the hope of being employed abroad. Our teachers choose to be domestic helpers in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Malaysia and other Asian countries or the Middle East.

What do these numberless hopes tell us? People seek for a better life; but the life sought is in the temporal order. Sure there is optimism here and human striving. However, it is struggle that often builds up a passion for the material, the powerful, constituents of a life which pose a temptation to live by the tenet: "C’mon accumulate enough money, eat, drink, dance, enjoy and be merry for tomorrow you die." And to the people who live by this tenet, death is the end. There is nothing here said about our rightful destiny as God would have it and which says that He is the beginning and source of everything, and that He is the end. Alpha and Omega meaning the beginning and the end.

Yes, it is good for people to hope for a better life and to strive after attaining it. Hope, that is; but hope in God. Hope beyond what we ordinarily hope for in this temporary life. Christianity ought to welcome the progress of this life – the progress of the sciences, to strive also for the channeling of new knowledge and technological development for the benefit of mankind as a whole. But Christianity is too realistic to be carried away by an easy optimism that sees in technology and development the salvation and the solution of its problems. Human sinfulness is not so easily overcome.

Christian hope is in God’s activity and presence in the world. Again, this hope, as Christian is specific – it is based on the presence and activity of God in Christ, seen as the focus and activity that extend throughout the created world. The God who confers, sustains and perfects the being of His creatures and Who has signally demonstrated His work in Christ – His Passion and Death on the Cross and Resurrection – is the ground for Christian hope. He is the reason and the ground for any activity in human achievement, for only as such achievement is promoted and guided by divine grace can it in the long run be brought to good effect. This the dynamism that is in Christian hope.

Our Lord makes this clear in the parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins. Jewish custom in the time of Our Lord required virgin ladies to accompany the bridegroom during the wedding procession when he fetches the bride from the house of her father. These supposed to be ‘bridesmaids’ in our present custom were supposed to carry torches or lamps. Jesus loved to speak of His people as His ‘bride’ indicating the kind of loving relationship we should have with Him. At the end He gathers His people to Himself to consummate this divine work of love and reconciliation. To be numbered among those He brings to salvation, each of us has to be ready, meaning, we should be in divine grace all the time, i.e. we are in state of grace; we are not in sin.

Let us clearly understand that Christian hope has to do with where we are now in the midst of the world, and that is, consummation at the end of our life here on earth really does depend on how we cooperate now with God’s work. This cooperation is not a matter of indifference but something in which God counts above all. So while we rightly emphasize God and His work as the ground of Christian hope, we have to recognize here as everywhere else, in the need of Christian life the need for man’s obedient response.

The doctrine of an end that organizes the Christian understanding of the world, brings hope and meaning into the picture. The God who creates is also the destiny toward which all those in the grace of God are drawn, a destiny not of death, but of new creativity and letting-be. After the end of this life on earth, a new vista opens to those in grace and who have a faith in God, a vista infinitely greater and more comprehensive than we had imagined. In the perspective of the Christian faith it is our greatest hope in this mortal life to arrive at this final end when the bridegroom of Christian soul will come to take His own. That’s why He readies us, "…stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour."

Thirty-Second Day in Ordinary Time, Matthew 25:1-13.