Monday: The New Word: Hope
WEEK 28
MONDAY
THE NEW WORD: HOPE
1 Peter 1:3-5
We are studying the mastery of despair—despair as to the universe and life. All the other faiths except Christianity have what John Baillie notes “indifference to the events of the time-series, whether present or future, through steadfast contemplation of the timeless nature of things, timeless reason, timeless beauty, timeless divinity.”*
Augustine translates Psalm 12:8 as “The wicked walk in circles.” But in the non-Christian faiths, not only the wicked but people as people, the good as well as the bad, walk in circles, getting nowhere in this mundane existence. Only as one escapes into the spiritual does a person get anywhere. That leaves people pessimistic about the world process. There is no hope for it or any hope in it. The only hope is to escape from it. “The wise man is the man who is as much without hope as without fear, the man who is altogether indifferent to what the future may bring!”** Even a new beginning could bring “no ground of hopeful rejoicing since the new round of things would be exactly like the old, witnessing the same process of degeneration, and coming full circle again to the same melancholy end.”***
That was the world of thought and idea and outlook into which Christianity burst. Its impact brought a new, vibrant word: hope. In almost all literature “hope is regarded as an evil thing. It is ignis fatuus, the great deceiver.”† In all except this new faith. Here hope emerged. Paul told the Christians in Ephesus that when they were pagans, they had no hope (Eph 2:12). The fact is that nobody had any hope until they got into touch with this new dynamic of hope in the Christian faith.
Jesus never used the word hope; to him it was all realization. But when his thoughts and spirit came into contact with the minds and hearts of people, a new hope sprang up. There was a new hope about everything: life, destiny, the future, and the world itself. What was the new thing that brought this new hope’?
O Lord, you have begotten us into a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. When he left the tomb, we arose with him full of hope and cheer. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am a child of hope. I belong to the deathless hope, hope about life and destiny and people.
* John Baillie, The Belief in Progress (Oxford University Press, 1950), 52.
** Ibid., 65.
*** Ibid., 50.
† Ibid., 65.