I recently listened to one of those thrillers with a solitary protagonist who has incredible military fighting skills. He goes up alone against all odds in opposition to forces of evil, in this case an international ring of sex traffickers. Most of the book is in the first person narrative of the hero, and he is constantly saying to himself a refrain he learned in the military, “Hope is not a strategy.”
That phrase, “Hope is not a strategy,” is evidently a commonly expressed adage in the armed forces. The point seems to be that merely hoping a mission or battle will turn out well is no substitute for a well-thought-out plan and clear goals. That slogan and attitude has spawned adopters of the slogan beyond the military, including a book about making sales and a weight loss plan from Rachel Hollis. Don’t hope. Instead, make a plan.
Such demotion of hope to a sort of wishful thinking in serious endeavors stands in contrast to the almost constant popular encouragement to “have hope.” TV and movie characters are constantly saying something like that to each other. Though I am often critical of such popular cliches, there is something to the notion that hope does in fact lead to good outcomes. There is a recent article on the on-line journal of the U.S. Army War College which declares, “Hope is Not a Strategy: It’s the Only Strategy.” The author argues that large scale hope in significant benefit to human life and progress has strengthened and sustained just war efforts and good leaders of the past. Giving up on hope would be a poor strategy.
Those who adopt the “hope is not a strategy” mindset presumably believe that reliance on hope will produce disappointment. Without good planning, the hoped for outcome will not appear. The war will be lost, the sale will fall through, and the weight will come back. Yet our text for Sunday, Romans 5:1-5, offers in verses 3 and 4 a strange progression which begins with suffering and ends with hope. And then verse 5 proclaims, “and hope does not disappoint us.”
As Christians we have our own unique reasons for believing that hope does not disappoint us, and therefore hope may be a very good strategy indeed. We may flourish lines like Juliana of Norwich’s “And all shall be well,” or Rev. Al Sharpton’s beautiful declaration in his eulogy for George Floyd this week:
I turned to the end of the book. And I know how this story is going to end. The first will be last. The last will be first. The lion and the lamb is going to lay down together and God will take care of his children. We got some difficult days ahead, but I know how the story is going to end. There’s going to be justice for George Floyd. There’s going to be justice for Eric Garner. This story won’t end like this. God will never leave us, nor forsake us. I been to the end of the book. Let’s fight on. Let’s stand together. Let us not leave this family now that this ceremony is over.
We do truly have hope because our faith, because our holy Book teaches us that all will be well and that the story will have a happy ending. Yet at the same time we make those affirmations, we need to grasp what Paul is saying here in Romans 5 about the role suffering plays in growing that hope. Suffering is the ugly, muddy dirt from which the stem of hope grows. Suffering is the miry clay down through which we must plunge in order to reach the bedrock of hope. Without suffering we won’t be able to grasp and hold onto true and solid hope, hope which will in fact not disappoint.
That’s all why hope is, in fact, a strategy, but suffering is part of the tactics by which
God enables us to carry out that strategy. That tactic of letting us suffer may seem awful cruel on God’s part, but we still hope, because we know that whatever God does, He does in love, as Paul affirms at the end of verse 5, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” We hope in love because of our faith, and says Paul in another place, “Love never fails.”