What we do not see – 31 May 2015

For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. [Romans 8:24-25]

But hope doesn’t seem nearly enough, for many people.  It is much more reassuring to have certainty, clarity, definitions.  “Don’t you know what you believe?” asked a parishioner once, when I may have been getting a little too oblique or poetic for her taste.  People have abandoned the church because it can’t give assurances.  Others walk out because the church they encountered was altogether too confident and dogmatic about mysteries and large questions about life and death.

St Paul’s world was every bit as hostile as ours.  Disease, violence, widespread injustice, dispossession, unbridgeable gulfs between rich and poor, slavery, constant uncertainty.   I imagine the main difference between Paul’s world and ours is that we have much more efficient means of killing people.   Our world would not have been foreign to him in its evil. 

Hope – St Paul’s word -- normally means some nice blending of what we would like and what we expect.  We hope that what we would like and what we realistically expect are the same.  Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield lived in hope of something turning up, especially something of a pecuniary nature.  I hope Christ’s Church will one day be united, and be a light to the world.  Paul says we hope for what we do not see.  I hope for a better distribution of wealth in New Zealand.  I hope succeeding generations are not going to be battling more and more extreme weather and natural disaster.  That’s more or less what we mean by hope.

I think St Paul meant more than that.  The way he writes of hope and the way he writes of faith are pretty well indistinguishable, so far as I can see.  The fact that both hope and faith are grounded in Christ, crucified and risen – and not just in “hoping against hope” – is precisely the point.  What we don’t see, we may see by the eye of faith.  What we hope for is already happening in us, in our hearts, in our best longings, because we are changing.  Even our despair, at times, happens precisely because we know the better and we aren’t seeing it right now from where we are.

So, says St Paul, we wait for it with patience.  Contemplative people learn how to wait.  A sign of mature discipleship is the ability and the willingness to live and love amid what is probably, usually, predictably, anything but perfect.  I would add that a sense of humour helps, and a strong sense of the ridiculous – maybe St Paul knew that too, but I assume he forgot to say so.  Waiting with patience is totally contemplative, it is the absolute precondition of wisdom – and perhaps even seeing, fleeting, in the distance, a glimpse of God’s love and truth coming to fulfilment, a New Jerusalem.