Hope

Transcribed from the recording and lightly cleaned for reading — false starts removed, proper names and Scripture references restored. Nothing has been added or reordered. The Scripture he reads follows the New Revised Standard Version, and the Catechism its official English text.

How are you doing? Long time no see, right? I want to talk to you today about a special inspiration that I had, and this is going to be about hope. H-O-P-E.

To be honest, when I moved to Belfast — we’re talking eleven years ago, 2015 — in the first few months that I was living in a state of grace, I noticed that hope is maybe the virtue that this place needs the most. I saw it among young people. I saw it among people from all walks of life. And I realised that it seems that many people have lost hope. To ignite in their hearts the grace of hope will be maybe the biggest challenge and the biggest necessity. So I will be talking a bit about hope.

You have probably heard the First Letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13, where St. Paul talks about the gift of love. But I’m not sure if you ever paid attention to the very last verse. In First Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 13, he says:

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

I have the impression that St. Paul is talking in a ladder, or step by step. Faith, hope and love are the three theological virtues, and it seems that one needs to lead to the other. I could end up making a series, but in this one specifically I’m going to talk about hope.

And it comes to my mind: what is hope? I already said that hope is a theological virtue, and we can go to the Catechism of the Catholic Church to see what a theological virtue is. In paragraph 1812, this is what it says:

The human virtues are rooted in the theological virtues, which adapt man’s faculties for participation in the divine nature: for the theological virtues relate directly to God. They dispose Christians to live in a relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have the One and Triune God for their origin, motive, and object.

In other words, being a theological virtue means it is inside ourselves. God gave every single person the theological virtues of faith, of hope and of charity. But what happens is that sometimes these virtues are buried among so many things that so many people regard as more important, and sometimes they can look as if they are not in that person’s heart.

You look at people who commit crimes, who commit atrocities, and you say it’s impossible that this person has faith. I cannot believe that people who go and kill each other in cold blood have some sort of charity within themselves. But they do. It doesn’t matter. Even Hitler, even the worst of human beings you can think of, capable of doing the worst things you can think of — they have within themselves the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. But again, sometimes they are buried. Sometimes they are there, covered by sins, by worries, by other things. But just to be clear, all of us have this.

And just to go further, here is the second paragraph that talks about the theological virtues, 1813:

The theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity; they animate it and give it its special character. They inform and give life to all the moral virtues. They are infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and of meriting eternal life. They are the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being. There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.

And so the Catechism talks about faith, and then we go on to 1817, where it talks about hope:

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. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.” “The Holy Spirit … he poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that we might be justified by his grace and become heirs in hope of eternal life.”

The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven; it keeps man from discouragement; it sustains him during times of abandonment; it opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity.

I’m going to stop here, because this is going to be too much — too cold, too written. But it is interesting, and it is important for us to understand what hope really is.

I selected a few passages here from the Scriptures. And if I’m being honest, I think faith is what is lacking. That’s why people don’t have hope, and that’s why people are not led to charity: there’s no faith.

Or rather — I really love the way a priest who died around twenty years ago in Brazil used to express this. Father Léo: if you read my formations, you’ve probably read me talking about him. He used to say that if people say they believe in anything, that means they believe in nothing; and if they say they believe in nothing, it means they believe in everything.

So a lot of people have no faith, either because of the abuses, or because of the story they had with the Church, with the priests. Many people can only associate faith with a negative experience, so they completely despise their Catholic faith, the way they were brought up. And because of that, when times of difficulty come, times of grief, times of death, all sorts of struggles, they surrender, and they sort of attest their faith in nothing, saying: “If God is good, why did this person die? If God is good, why did this happen to me? If God is good, why do so many horrible things keep happening in the world? Why the wars? Why all this bad stuff going on?”

But we need to understand that there is one aspect that God doesn’t touch, which is our free will. Many people would like God to be a perverse dictator who forces us: “You need to believe in me. You need to trust me. You need to do…” Though we do need to believe in God, we do need to hope in God, we need to love God, God doesn’t force us. He gave us free will.

And in our free will we are free to love him or to hate him, to love each other or to hate each other, to do what is good or what is evil. We are free to choose. And many people are choosing evil. Many people are choosing bad things to do. Many people are choosing whatever comes into their head, and they think, “Well, that’s the best for me,” and they just do it, despite other people, despite the evil that can happen in a lot of people’s lives.

Presidents, people in power, people in authority, politicians — but also people in authority within the Church: priests, bishops, the Pope. Many people in authority have decided to do what is evil. And there’s no other way: you sow evil, you reap evil. You’re going to get what you put in there. So the evil in the world is the fruit of our own choices.

And sometimes it is difficult to dissociate the evil that we see a priest commit from our faith in God. It’s as if: “If the priest is bad, I’m not going to have faith. Why would I love a God who allows a priest to do this sort of thing?” But anyway, there are always going to be good and bad people.

Do you remember the parable where… Sorry, I’m recovering here from a terrible episode of two weeks when I was ill. But anyway, do you remember that there was a parable that Jesus told? I’m going to get this for you. It’s in the book of Matthew, chapter 13:

He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.’”

That means God allows true free will, good and bad. I think this is very basic, but some people have never heard this, and it explains a lot. The evil in the world is the fruit of our free will, of man’s bad choices.

So we need to regain — to allow the grace of faith that God put in our hearts to be alive. Many, many people have allowed faith to die in their hearts, and because they have no faith, they have no hope in anything.

But through the Bible we learn that in the New Testament our hope is one person: Christ. Our hope is in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Everything we hope for is in Christ. Everything we can achieve is in Christ. It is through Christ; it is with Christ.

That’s why I selected this passage here to talk to you about, what St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verse 11, “One in Christ”:

So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision” — a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands — remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father.

It’s amazing that Christ came, and he is our hope. See what St. Paul says: “strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” Jesus is the reason for our hope. Jesus is the reason for our faith, and Jesus is the reason for any love, any charity that can exist.

But I think this, which St. Paul also wrote to the Romans, is the synthesis of what hope is about. Our hope is not in this world. Our hope is not in human beings. Our hope is not in what is ephemeral. Our hope is in what is eternal. Our hope is in what God has prepared for us since the foundation of the world. That should fill our hearts with hope. So St. Paul says in chapter 8, verse 18, of the book of Romans:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.

Amazing. Amazing.

I wanted to talk about hope because a few things happened this month that brought a lot of hope into my heart — hope, and divine providence.

When you think there’s no way, when you think you’re going to succumb, when you think you are surrounded and there’s no way out, you’re going to drown in the difficulties, you’re going to lose faith, you’re going to lose hope, you’re going to become anything but what God wants — then it’s as if God allows things to happen to test our faith, to improve our hope, and to make our charity come alive. It’s amazing how God does things.

He likes to do things this way. It’s his way of doing things. You remember the wedding at Cana: Jesus knew that there was going to be no wine left. He wanted this to happen — his mother to intercede, people to see the miracle happen. Sometimes it’s a miracle that’s going to bring back hope, faith and charity into your hearts. Is this what you need? Is this what’s going on in your life today?

For me, I had a clear sign of God’s providence through someone I never expected, who sent me something in the post. It was so unexpected, but it came at the perfect time. Someone who knocked at my door when I had scattered all my resources, and it brought back hope at the last minute.

Generally, this is the way God does it. You see, in a football match you have the first half, 45 minutes, and then the second half, 45 minutes, and sometimes you have extra time. God generally does things after the second half is over, in extra time.

So don’t lose faith. Don’t lose hope. Don’t give up on loving God, on living through charity.

Another part here really touches me, all the time. As I was saying — in a spirit of faith, in a spirit of hope, in a spirit of charity — this passage here is as if St. Paul wrote it with fire in his hands, with fire in his heart, with fire in his body, in his soul, in his spirit. This transmits fire.

If there’s no hope in your heart anymore, if you have given up, if you have lost hope in life, lost faith, if you think love doesn’t exist anymore, I wish you would hear this as Paul wrote it: with the enthusiasm, with the ardour, with the desire that he had in his heart.

After meeting Jesus, he spent his whole life for the propagation of the Gospel, speaking about Christ to the four ends of the earth. St. Paul is the great missionary that Jesus used, and through his letters we can really feel what the Church says about him: the heart of St. Paul is the heart of Christ.

And this is why — the letter to the Romans, chapter 8, verse 31:

What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?

Let hope be restored in your heart.

Who will bring any charge against God’s elect?

And this is you. You may think you have been living far away from the grace of God. You may think that you don’t deserve this, that you’re not God’s elect. But you are.

It is God who justifies.

God justifies you. God calls you, and calls me. God doesn’t rely on our abilities. He doesn’t rely on our merits. He doesn’t rely on our own doing. It is God’s grace.

Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.

You may have causes in your life that you consider lost. You may have circumstances in your history that you consider the worst — there’s no way anything worse could have happened. But we have someone who intercedes for us: for our good, for our happiness, for our faith — like he interceded for St. Peter. He said, “Satan wanted you, and I interceded for you.” He does the same for us.

You who may be thinking you’re going to fall into that terrible sin; you who cannot get rid of these old habits; you who have given up your faith because there’s no hope, there’s no way you’re going to overcome those habitual sins, there’s no way you’re going to be a holy person, there’s no way you’re going to live a pure life after everything — there is hope.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ?

This is like a fire. This is like a burning inside of St. Paul, and this fire needs to be within ourselves at this moment.

Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

And you know, what brings hope is the love of Christ. It is the person of Christ. It’s he himself: the giver of faith, the giver of love, the giver of the Spirit, the giver of hope. Let Christ ignite hope in your heart once again. He himself comes… Verse 38:

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.

This is so powerful. This is so intense. This is so divine. This is so gracious. How amazing God is.

Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ — nor your sin, nor your evil, nor anything that you committed with your own free will, nor the evil you caused to other people, nor anything you can think of: death, powers, angels, nothing.

Allow the love of Christ to touch you, to bring you faith, to bring you love, to bring you hope. May God bless you.