DARE to HOPE?

Pauline Books & Media
Sep 14
8 min read

“Hope does not disappoint”

(Rom 5:5).

In the spirit of hope, the Apostle Paul addressed these words of encouragement to the Christian community of Rome.

“Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit”

(Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1817).

"Hope as an anchor"

Heb 6:19

Hope is a virtue

Christians have hope not through their own merit. If they believe in the future, it is because Christ died and rose again and gave us his Spirit. “Redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present” (ibid., 1). In this sense, once again, we say that hope is a theological virtue: it does not emanate from us. It is not an obstinacy we want to convince ourselves of, but rather, a gift that comes directly from God.

The Apostle Paul presents the new logic of the Christian experience to the many doubting Christians who had not been completely reborn to hope: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:17-19). It is as if he had said: if you believe in the Resurrection of Christ, then you know with certainty that no defeat and no death is forever. But if you do not believe in the Resurrection of Christ, then everything becomes hollow, even the preaching of the Apostles.

Hope is a virtue against which we often sin: in our bad nostalgia, in our melancholy, when we think that the happiness of the past is buried forever. We sin against hope when we become despondent over our sins, forgetting that God is merciful and greater than our heart. And let us not forget this, brothers and sisters: God forgives everything, God forgives always. We are the ones who tire of asking for forgiveness. But let us not forget this truth: God forgives everything, God always forgives. We sin against hope when we become despondent over our sins; we sin against hope when the autumn in us cancels out the spring; when God’s love ceases to be an eternal fire and we do not have the courage to make decisions that commit us for a lifetime.

The world today is in great need of this Christian virtue! The world needs hope, just as it greatly needs patience, a virtue that journeys hand-in-hand with hope. Patient men are weavers of goodness. They stubbornly desire peace, and even if some of them are hasty and would like everything, straight away, patience is capable of waiting. Even when around us many have succumbed to disillusionment, those who are inspired by hope and are patient are able to get through the darkest of nights. Hope and patience go together.

Hope is the virtue of those who are young at heart; and here age does not matter because there are also elderly people whose eyes are filled with light, who live permanently striving towards the future. Think of the two great elderly people of the Gospel, Simeon and Anna: they never tired of waiting and they saw the last stretch of their earthly journey blessed by the encounter with the Messiah, whom they recognized in Jesus, brought to the Temple by his parents. What grace if it were like that for all of us! If after a long pilgrimage, setting down our saddlebags and staff, our heart were filled with a joy never before felt, and we too could exclaim: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to thy people Israel”. (Lk 2:2932).

Brothers and sisters, let us go ahead and ask for the grace to have hope, hope with patience. Always towards that definitive encounter; always thinking that the Lord is near us, that death will never ever be victorious. Let us go ahead and ask the Lord to give us this great virtue of hope, accompanied by patience.

General Audience, 8 May 2024, Pope Francis

Cycle of Catechesis. Vices and Virtues. 18. Hope

"If you have hope, this will make you cheerful"

Rom 12:12

The false hope of idols

Because faith means trusting in God — those who have faith trust in God — but there’s a moment when, in meeting life’s difficulties, man experiences the fragility of that trust and feels the need for various certainties — for tangible, concrete assurances. I entrust myself to God, but the situation is rather serious and I need a little more concrete reassurance. And there lies the danger! And then we are tempted to seek even ephemeral consolations that seem to fill the void of loneliness and alleviate the fatigue of believing. And we think we can find them in the security that money can give, in alliances with the powerful, in worldliness, in false ideologies. Sometimes we look for them in a god that can bend to our requests and magically intervene to change the situation and make it as we wish; an idol, indeed, that in itself can do nothing. It is impotent and deceptive. But we like idols; we love them! Once, in Buenos Aires, I had to go from one church to another, a thousand meters, more or less. And I did so on foot. And between them there is a park, and in the park there were little tables, where many, many fortune tellers were sitting. It was full of people who were even waiting in line. You would give them your hand and they’d begin, but the conversation was always the same: ‘there is a woman in your life, there is a darkness that comes, but everything will be fine ...’. And then, you paid. And this gives you security? It is the security of — allow me to use the word — nonsense. Going to a seer or to a fortune teller who reads cards: this is an idol! This is the idol, and when we are so attached to them, we buy false hope. Whereas, in that gratuitous hope, which Jesus Christ brought us, freely giving his life for us, sometimes we fail to fully trust.

General Audience, Pope Francis, 11 January 2017

"We were hoping"

Luke 24:21

A word of hope

2. “Since we are justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing in the glory of God… Hope does not disappoint, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:1-2.5). In this passage, Saint Paul gives us much to reflect upon. We know that the Letter to the Romans marked a decisive turning point in his work of evangelization. Until then, he had carried out his activity in the eastern part of the Empire, but now he turns to Rome and all that Rome meant in the eyes of the world. Before him lay a great challenge, which he took up for the sake of preaching the Gospel, which knows no barriers or confines. The Church of Rome was not founded by Paul, yet he felt impelled to hasten there in order to bring to everyone the Gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified and risen from the dead, a message of hope that fulfils the ancient promises, leads to glory and, grounded in love, does not disappoint.

3. Hope is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross: “For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life” (Rom 5:19). That life becomes manifest in our own life of faith, which begins with Baptism, develops in openness to God’s grace and is enlivened by a hope constantly renewed and confirmed by the working of the Holy Spirit. By his perennial presence in the life of the pilgrim Church, the Holy Spirit illumines all believers with the light of hope. He keeps that light burning, like an ever-burning lamp, to sustain and invigorate our lives. Christian hope does not deceive or disappoint because it is grounded in the certainty that nothing and no one may ever separate us from God’s love: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” ( Rom 8:35.37-39). Here we see the reason why this hope perseveres in the midst of trials: founded on faith and nurtured by charity, it enables us to press forward in life. As Saint Augustine observes: “Whatever our state of life, we cannot live without these three dispositions of the soul, namely, to believe, to hope and to love”. [1]

4. Saint Paul is a realist. He knows that life has its joys and sorrows, that love is tested amid

trials, and that hope can falter in the face of suffering. Even so, he can write: “We boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces

hope” (Rom 5:3-4).

Spes Non Confundit, Pope Francis, 9th May 2024

Read Spes Non Confundit here

We "abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit"

Rom 15:13

Advice from Pope Benedict XVI

Day by day, man experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes. Young people can have the hope of a great and fully satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession, or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole. It becomes evident that man has need of a hope that goes further.

In this sense it is true that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life ( cf. Eph 2:12). Man's great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God.

Let us say once again: we need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day.. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us, what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope.

Spes Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI, 30 November 2007

Read Spes Salvi here