The primary virtue at Easter might seem to be faith, needed in order to hold fast to the reality of Christ’s miraculous Resurrection in an age which rejects the very possibility. But there is a neglected virtue which ought to be at the core of an Easter spirituality, namely hope.

Hope illuminates not how the Resurrection happened, but why. Without hope, the Resurrection would be rendered pointless, even if one still believed it was true. So why has hope received so little attention? One reason may be that hope is often mistaken for optimism, which is easily punctured. The conviction that “things will turn out well in the end” is regularly proved to be unfounded. In the absence of a coherent and robust theology of hope, it is not difficult to confuse it with “baptised optimism”, which is both superficial and flawed. Does Christian preaching on hope make the distinction clear enough? It is precisely when things do not turn out well in the end that genuine Christian hope takes centre stage. The opposite of hope is not pessimism, but despair.