In our look at the three theological virtues, faith, hope and love, we now turn to hope for a few weeks. My unscientific guess is that the word “hope” appears in ordinary conversation much more often than does the word “faith.” One effect of the common and frequent use of the term is that it seems to have several different senses.
As a Christian virtue, hope seems to be the next step in a progression that begins with faith. Hope goes beyond faith in its apprehension and grasp of things future, like the return of Christ or our own resurrection and “hope of glory.” Yet in regular usage, “hope” seems a little weaker than “faith.”
For instance, I may “hope” that the person I voted for wins the election, while having very little confidence that she will. So I can have hope for some future outcome without having much faith at all that it will happen. I can buy a lottery ticket and hope to win, while having almost no faith or any sort of expectation that I actually will win.
Yet for Christians hope is a further development of faith, and is in some way superior to faith. Author Peter Kreeft says that faith is the seed, hope is the stem, and love is the flower. If anything, Christian hope feels even more confidence than faith, rather than less. A traditional prayer at the graveside of a Christian believer begins, “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ…”
It’s that kind of “sure and certain hope” which we hear in our text for this Sunday, Ephesians 1:15-23. In verse 15, Paul says he has heard of the Ephesians’ faith, but then he goes on in verses 17 and 18 to pray for them to take the next step, as it were. He prays that they may be given further wisdom and revelation by the Spirit and then in verse 18, “so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints…”
In times like these we may often say we need hope, and we may often express the lesser, weaker form of hope in thoughts or words such as, “I hope this virus thing is over soon.” But the hope we have in Christ builds on our faith that Jesus is the true source of all that is good for us and that we believe in outcomes that go beyond anything which may or may not occur in either the immediate or distant future in this world and this life. As such, Christian hope, like Christian faith, is a gift from God which offers us a deeper assurance of things yet unseen than is available through any measure ordinary hoping.
As we celebrate Jesus’ ascension this Sunday we recall that our faith includes the promise of the angels to the disciples in Acts 1:11, that Jesus will return from heaven to this world once again. Even in the most difficult of times, faithful confidence in the witness of the apostles to that angelic word and Jesus’ own promise to return leads us further on to that “sure and certain hope” expressed in Christian liturgy on the saddest of occasions. Let us live in that hope in every occasion.