A Hope for the New Year, Courtesy of Benedict XVI
Solemnity of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God
Imagine wanting something, or needing something, and not really knowing what it is you need. You think you know what you need. You believe you know what it is you want. But when you obtain the object of your heart’s desire—when you find whatever it is for which you have been looking—you remain dissatisfied. You want more. You still need something. Imagine living that kind of life.
Many people in the world seem live that kind of life because many people in the world seem to struggle with hope. We talk about hope all the time. Politicians tell us that hope is something we create through our own efforts, a promise for the future that we make for ourselves. We talk to our children or among one another about hope as a reasonable possibility for a future outcome. Hope is something less than a dream but more than a shot in the dark. Hope is about the future. Because a desired outcome seems reasonable to us now—something for which we can work, something that we can accomplish through our efforts—we can say that the reasonableness of our desire for the future fills us with hope now. I have hope (so I tell myself) because the future I want seems possible for me. The warrant for my hope is grounded in the future.
That kind of hope is not Christian hope. Pope Benedict XVI, whose death we mourn together as a Church, teaches us that the warrant for our hope is not grounded in the future but rather is given to us in the present. He talks about St. Paul, who in his Letter to the Ephesians, asks us to 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 (2:12). Pope Benedict says “that to come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope” (Spe Salvi §3). Well, when do we come to know God, at some time in the future or now? The answer, of course, is that we know God now. We know God in the present moment. God makes himself known to us through Christ. And Christ gives himself to us through the Church and her sacraments. Knowing Christ now—living in relationship with Christ in the present moment—is the promise of our redemption. And what we call ‘knowing Christ now’ is hope. “Redemption is offered to us,” says Pope Benedict, “in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present: the present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads towards a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey (Spe Salvi, §1).”
So, there is the question for us: if hope is the promise of redemption that comes from knowing God now, and if we really, genuinely do know God now in our present lives through the Church and her sacraments, then why do so many people lack hope? Why is there despair and anxiety in the Church? Why do Christians suffer from sadness and depression? What is the cause of the anger and the fear, the division and the animosity?
Pope Benedict gives at least two answers to these kinds of questions. For his first answer, Pope Benedict teaches that “We who have always lived with the Christian concept of God, and have grown accustomed to it, have almost ceased to notice that we possess the hope that ensues from a real encounter with this God.” In other words, we Christians are jaded, spoiled maybe, by the rich inheritance of faith that we have received. There is a disconnect somewhere in our experience of faith and liturgy and worship. We come to Mass, but the reception of a sacrament is not experienced as a real encounter with God. We pray, and maybe there is some kind of real encounter with God for us but there is no hope—no promise of redemption that comes from knowing God now—that follows from our worship. We finish our prayer consumed with uncertainty or doubt, consumed with concerns about the future. There is a disconnect somewhere in our experience of faith and liturgy and worship.
The second answer that Pope Benedict gives is just as sobering: too many Christians are infected by the logic of the world. He explains that:
Day by day, man experiences many greater or lesser hopes, different in kind according to the different periods of his life. Sometimes one of these hopes may appear to be totally satisfying without any need for other hopes. Young people can have the hope of a great and fully satisfying love; the hope of a certain position in their profession, or of some success that will prove decisive for the rest of their lives. When these hopes are fulfilled, however, it becomes clear that they were not, in reality, the whole. It becomes evident that man has need of a hope that goes further. It becomes clear that only something infinite will suffice for him, something that will always be more than he can ever attain. In this regard our contemporary age has developed the hope of creating a perfect world that, thanks to scientific knowledge and to scientifically based politics, seemed to be achievable. Thus, Biblical hope in the Kingdom of God has been displaced by hope in the kingdom of man, the hope of a better world which would be the real “Kingdom of God” (Spe Salvi, §30).
Here the cause of our lack of hope is not a disconnect in our experience of faith but rather our obsession with the future. The hope of glory, says St. Paul, is Christ in us (Colossians 1:27). And Christ is in us now—in the present moment— through the life of the Church. But we lose sight of the present moment for the sake of the future. We have lives to build and ambitions to realize. Future needs get in the way of present gift. Hope becomes the reality that we construct for ourselves, a hope that is grounded in the reasonableness of our desire for the future. We look out at the world and what we see is not the presence of God but rather everything that the world lacks; we fixate on what is missing, focus on what is broken. The greatest tragedy for the Christian life follows along the same lines. We forget that Christ is with us now, forget that the work of salvation is accomplished through the eternal sacrifice on the Cross, and we spend our Christian lives searching for a messiah who has already come. Imagine: missing the presence of Christ in the world because of obsession with a future world that does not yet exist. There is the spiritual condition of far too many Christians today.
How, then, are we supposed to hope? The answer that Pope Benedict gives is love, which is to say that the answer is Christ. He says that:
God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect (Spe Salvi, §31).
The God who has a human face. For just over fifty years now, the Church has celebrated the Solemnity of the Virgin Mary, Mother of God at the beginning of the new civil year. And there, really, is the source of our hope: the human face of God. In our reading from the Book of Numbers today, there is a prayer that the Lord let his face shine upon us. Well, the face of the Lord has shone upon us, a face that belongs to Christ. There is as much cause for hope in the year ahead as there has been at any point in history. And why? Because the Christ who claims the Virgin Mary as his mother continues to dwell among us. The way that we leverage the past and the future against the present moment, losing sight of the face of God, none of that is fair to Christ, who is with us now. What do you see when you look out at the world? There is the question that hope provokes. And maybe, there in the background, out toward the edge of the mental photograph you have taken of the world around you, is a cause for doubt and anxiety and despair and sadness. Maybe. But there in the foreground, for the Christian, right there in front of you, is Christ, who is the hope of glory.
Homily preached on December 31st, 2022 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary