Question 7.116

7.116 How exactly can this hope be summoned up?

Hope is nothing other than Christian optimism. It allows man to remain firm in the faith, fully assured by God’s promises. In hope, God is the guarantor of my future and of my serene stability. Christians must always be optimistic and joyful; but this is an attitude that results from faith in the power of a God who never loses a battle so that man might experience peace and glory with him. Faith is the foundation of hope, a new dimension of man that leads him toward divinity. And so, in his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul writes: “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and 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 through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:1-5).

Since our faith and our hope rest in God, we have nothing to fear. The Christian can say with assurance: “And now, Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you. … I am silent, I do not open my mouth; for it is you who have done it” (Ps 39:7, 9).

In 2007, in his encyclical Spe salvi, Benedict XVI wrote brilliantly about hope: ” ‘Hope’, in fact, is a key word in Biblical faith-so much so that in several passages the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ seem interchangeable. Thus the Letter to the Hebrews closely links the ‘fullness of faith’ (10:22) to ‘the confession of our hope without wavering’ (10:23). Likewise, when the First Letter of Peter exhorts Christians to be always ready to give an answer concerning the logos-the meaning and the reason-of their hope (cf. 3:15), ‘hope’ is equivalent to ‘faith’. We see how decisively the self-understanding of the early Christians was shaped by their having received the gift of a trustworthy hope, when we compare the Christian life with life prior to faith, or with the situation of the followers of other religions. Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were ‘without God’ and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. In nihil ab nihilo quam cito recidimus (How quickly we fall back from nothing to nothing): so says an epitaph of that period. In this phrase we see in no uncertain terms the point Paul was making. In the same vein he says to the Thessalonians: you must not ‘grieve as others do who have no hope’ (1 Thess 4:13). Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. So now we can say: Christianity was not only ‘good news’-the communication of a hitherto unknown content. In our language we would say: the Christian message was not only ‘informative’ but ‘performative’. That means: the Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known-it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life” (SS 2).