how to have hope
Reflection for Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Lent
Isaiah 49:14–15
But Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me,
my Lord has forgotten me.”Can a woman forget her nursing-child,
or show no compassion for the child of her womb?Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
In the Sunday School and Wednesday series on atonement I’ve been co-leading at Fellowship UCC recently, we’ve been recently grappling with the problem of evil, the reality of death, and the fact that good things keep coming to seemingly bad people. It is the ultimate existential conundrum, the problem of theodicy, and the questions and and conversations I’ve been having with congregants recently reveals that it is far from just an academic exercise. Theodicy is a reality in people’s lives, especially in a world where it seems so much of what we know is coming apart at the seams.
I don’t really have good answers for folks on this, despite the fact that my entire Master’s thesis was on the topic of theodicy. These are thorny and hard questions, ones that really can’t stand up under a committed barrage from those who, rightly, see a world that seems very far from the kin-dom of God or the Garden of Eden.
Moving from that despair to a Christ-laced hope requires an conscious choice, and frankly, I can’t fault those who are not ready or willing to step across that gap. There are many, many days I don’t feel ready or able to as well.
What pulls me back? It is passages like this, from Isaiah today, that reaffirm for me what I feel deep down to be true about God: that God, above all else, is love, and that the words of Paul in describing love are undoubtedly true:
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
God is not going to give up on us. God, who is love, is not going to consign us to an existence of suffering. God’s love wins, in the end. No matter how hard we try to subvert it; no matter how much some actors and powers work to obscure it - in the end, all those efforts come to naught. As Isaiah tells us, like the power of a mother’s connection to her child, so much more so God’s to us.
Does that sentiment help, when we are faced with injustice and oppression and violence and evil and death? Some days - most days - maybe not. But hope is not an endless upward trajectory towards victory. It is little glimpses, here and there, that it is up to us to grasp on to, if we can.