Catholic Outlook Magazine | September Edition | Season of Creation | 2023 Issue

Looking Deeper
is something that still functions even when trouble
brews on the horizon and our emotional prospects
are not so warm and shiny.
Hope – Christian hope – is a gift of God. Both faith
and hope are gifts. God enables us to believe and to
trust to God’s goodness and love for us. Really, what
we hope is that God is at work to bring all things to
a good purpose. It may be that we cannot see how
God can achieve good in a particular situation; hope
trusts that despite our limited vision, God can and
will bring life to whatever situation of death we may
be experiencing.
Hope is wide awake about the past and the present
but has an eye to the future that God wills for God’s
creation. This is so, even though we human beings
cause hurt to one another and to this Earth that God
has entrusted to us.
Christian hope has a history. That is, both the ability
to hope and what we hope for as Christians goes far
back in history to Abraham and even further back to
Noah. Always, God is committed to helping God’s
creation flourish. Before God brought a great flood
on the earth, God made a covenant with Noah and
his family, to keep them alive (Gen 6:17-21). Later,
God made a covenant with Abraham, promising him
land, descendants and that he would be a blessing
(Gen 12: 1-3; 15: 1-21). These covenants that God
offered to Noah and Abraham are the deep basis of
all our hope. They are promises by God to ensure life,
often in situations that are strongly marked by death.
Here, we find hints about how we keep Christian
hope alive. Of course, we need to do everything
we can at a practical level to make life as positive
as possible. We need to take care of our bodies,
our minds, our feelings and our relationships with
those people central to our lives. Beyond our own
immediate needs, we must care for our world, God’s
creation, and work for peace and justice. In all these
activities, we use the best knowledge and practices
that human wisdom has learned from experience.
But when we have done all the best practices in the
world, we may still find that our hearts are empty or
easily troubled. This calls us to activate our Christian
hope, looking each day for the small, quiet but steady
evidence of God’s creative activity all around us. The
resurrection of Jesus reverberates, echoes and pulses
in the life of the world. As Pope Francis said,
It is the Resurrection that gives us the greatest hope,
because it opens our lives and the life of the world to
the eternal future of God, to full happiness.” 2
1
Walter Brueggemann, A Gospel of Hope, First edition. (Louisville,
Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2018) p. 104-105.
2
Pope Francis, general audience, April 3, 2013.
Associate Professor Michele Connolly RSJ is a Doctor,
author and theologian.
But the absolute basis for our hope is Jesus himself,
in his resurrection from the dead. This act of God
changes everything. It shows us God’s ultimate,
loving intention – that in some way that is real for the
kind of body-persons that we are, God intends to
bring us beyond death to a life free from mortality, free
to be in ease-full, sublime union with God’s own self.
The great US biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann,
sums up Christian hope when he writes:
Hope in Gospel faith is not just a vague feeling that
things will work out, for it is evident that things will
not just work out. Rather, hope is the conviction,
against a great deal of data, that God is tenacious
and persistent in overcoming the deathliness of the
world, that God intends peace and joy. Christians
find compelling evidence, in the story of Jesus, that
Jesus, with great persistence and great vulnerability,
everywhere he went, turned the enmity of society
toward a new possibility, turned the sadness of the
world toward joy, introduced a new regime where the
dead are raised, the lost are found, and the displaced
are brought home again. We draw our hope from the
breath-taking memory of this Jesus! 1