7th March 2025

Living Hope.

The Church of England’s Lent theme this year is Living Hope; a Lent Journey.

Christian hope and secular hope could not be more different. Secular hope is the cherishing of a desire with an optimistic spirit of expectation, seeking to make the best out of uncertainty – we hope for good weather on our holidays, we hope we will pass our exams, we hope for a good harvest, for peace with justice in the world today. All these are hoping for and recent events amply illustrate how much jeopardy there is in such hoping.

By contrast, Christian hope is ‘hoping from’, hoping from our certain knowledge that our covenant God will fulfil all his loving purposes for his people; hoping from all that his son, Jesus Christ has done for us, redeeming our past, obtaining forgiveness of sins and assurance that our futures are safe in him. This is not fantasy but reality, the reality that finds its way from a birth in Bethlehem to a cross on Calvary and an empty tomb on Easter Day and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. Christian hope is hope rooted in the Christ event recorded in the gospels, so Jesus last words on the cross – ‘It is finished’, namely his work was complete, spells out the basis of our hope – ‘hope from’.

The writers of the epistles offer that hope from to disciples often living in difficult situations, often undergoing persecution. In the midst of the darkness there is hope; hope for the marginalised, hope for the downtrodden, hope for the suffering, and hope for the renewal of God’s creation.

Little wonder then that St Paul argues that there are three things that last for ever: Faith, Hope and Love, with Love affirmed as the greatest of the three. But Hope remains important. Dante is famous for his vision of hell with its gates menacingly labelled ‘Abandon all hope you who enter here’. By contrast in The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan has Hopeful providing comfort to Christian in Doubting Castle.

John Briggs