Living in joyful hope and dying in perfect trust

C21 | 24 AUGUST 2025 | LUKE 13:22-30 

This is yet another unsettling gospel. The ‘door’ to our salvation, we’re told, is open, but not wide, and it will not remain open indefinitely. We cannot enter, in other words, as and when we please. This gospel, then, is a much-needed reminder that time is of the essence and that we must not allow ourselves to be distracted, not just by bad things, but even by relatively unimportant things. 

This ‘wake-up call’ is not intended, however, to cast us into a state of fretful anxiety. Rather, it is meant to help us avoid two dangerous, if opposed, pitfalls, namely presumption and despair, the former inducing us to think, complacently, that nothing we do in this life will cost us heaven, the latter to think that, like Pelagius, only what we ourselves do will gain us heaven. In the light of these two snares, we sensibly pray during Mass both to be “saved from final damnation”, and to be “protected from all anxiety”. 

Between the Scylla of presumption and the Charybdis of despair, lies the virtue of hope. Again, one of the prayers of the Mass speaks of waiting “in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour.” ‘Joyful hope’ is how we are to dispose ourselves, as we journey in this life towards all that God has promised. 

Among the so-called ‘theological’ virtues, (‘theological’ because God is both their origin and their goal), we hear much about faith and love, but little about hope. St Thomas Aquinas, for one, was in no doubt that hope is crucial to the Christian life: it is, he says, the link between faith and love and love and joy, between what we long for and our final possession of that for which we long.1 Hope, he says, enables us to look to the future with calm confidence, neither taking the outcome for granted, nor living in anxious fear of loss. The virtue of hope, he says, “makes us tend towards God both as  the ultimate good sought after and as the unfailing source of help in attaining it.”

To live in hope, it has been said, is to be as one who peers from the prow of a ship in the direction of a still invisible destination lying beyond the horizon, in the knowledge that we are set fair for a goal we can as yet neither fully see nor finally arrive at by our own efforts alone. But hope does more than keep our final goal before our eyes: it enables us to set our hearts on it, while still attending to all that must be done in the time given to us here and now. The goal is God himself and the perfect happiness of sharing his life for all eternity. 

To live in hope is not, of course, the same as being a perennial optimist. Optimism may be an accident of temperament or born of fear for the future. But while a sometimes-useful strategy, optimism is never more than skin-deep. We would never say of someone that they were profoundly optimistic. 

The virtue of hope, on the other hand, isn’t accidental or something you can cultivate at will or acquire through discipline; nor is it the same as keeping a stiff upper lip or always looking “on the bright side of life”. Hope keeps permanently before us the unconditional love that God has had for us from all eternity and his desire for our friendship and company for the rest of eternity. It is a gift, a grace for which we should pray, since without hope, both living and dying would be unbearable. As St Thomas More wrote in the Tower of London while awaiting his execution: 

It will not go well with a man in all his affairs in this world if he hath not this mind in him: to show himself content to die and to depart unto God. 

But equally, hope does not dispense us from striving for good and avoiding evil here and now. It doesn’t mean that we can sit back and leave God to do all the work (which, of course, in one sense, he does, but with our co-operation and through, and sometimes even despite, us). We wisely pray at Mass to be “kept free from sin”, including also its deadening consequences, not least the dulling of hope. But even should we sin, hope keeps us focussed on God’s goodness, which is greater than even our worst sins. Being focussed on God’s goodness is the only lasting antidote to sin. 

To despair, on the other hand, as St Thomas says, is “to set personal fault above divine goodness and mercy….To wallow in our sins is a form of pride, as if, somehow, our sins are too much for God, even though his forgiveness is limitless.” Despair fails to take seriously that God desires above all else our perfect happiness, which is what is meant by ‘salvation’. 

And Christian hope looks even beyond death, because it sees in the Cross of Christ not defeat but victory, the victory of generous, selfless love. His victory over death enables us both to let go and love here and now and, when our time comes to die, to let go and trust in God’s infinite goodness, in which we have hoped throughout our life. “It is hope”, says St Augustine, “that makes us Christians.”