Hope?
Hope?
The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos, Dean of Salisbury
Sunday 22 June 2025 1st Sunday After Trinity
Genesis 24: 1–27
Mark 5: 21–end
The Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann died earlier this month. He was 92 years old, and had increasingly come to look like one of the ancient Hebrew prophets whose words he translated and interpreted with such diligence. At least, he had come to look like what we imagine the ancient Hebrew prophets would have looked like. Bearded, gaunt, and speaking with rare authority and insight.
In an unforgettable homily preached at Duke University in Holy Week 2009 Brueggemann acknowledges the horror that is so often present to the author of the Psalms. In that homily he is speaking of Psalm 31, but he might as well have been speaking of tonight’s Psalm, 57. We have heard that the soul of the Psalmist lies among lions, surrounded by spears, arrows and swords, a net stretched and a pit dug to capture them. All seems lost; despair is imminent.
And then, says Brueggemann, there is a ‘but’. ‘My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise’. In the face of overwhelming terror the Psalmist chooses God and chooses to give voice to the praise of God. Brueggemann calls this repentance. It is the Psalmist refusing to be consumed by self-obsession. It is the Psalmist recognizing, in Brueggemann’s words, ‘…that I am penultimate, that I am not the goal of existence…that my life is situated in a mystery and a gift and a summons that is beyond me and my dismay’.
I thought of Brueggemann as I was reintroduced to three of the characters from our other readings. Abraham’s unnamed servant swears on his life to venture to a far-off land to find a wife for his master’s heir. Jairus mourns a beloved daughter who dies while he is seeking help for her. The unnamed woman has suffered with haemorrhages for twelve years and has been reduced to poverty by her doctors. So: a high-stakes mission; a dangerously ill child; a life of sickness, penury, and social exclusion.
Each must have been close to despair, and each utters Brueggemann’s ‘but’; none lingers in the slough of their harsh circumstances. The servant prays by the well and commits his errand to God; Jairus goes to petition the wandering rabbi; the woman reaches out to touch his clothes.
These are stories of faith – for Mark at least, whose Gospel tells us of Jairus and of the woman with haemorrhages – these are stories of faith. But I wonder whether they might also have something to teach us about faith’s close cousin, hope. For in days like these we’re living through, with their daily reports of death and destruction, the very notion of hope seems like a cruel fantasy.
And I believe it is. For we have come to understand it hope as a cheery feeling, as an airy longing for things to get better. We hope for sunshine; we hope for a pay rise; we hope for a parking space. These so-called hopes are likely to be dashed. Cloud covers the sky. The budget means redundancies, not pay rises. The car park is already full. Hope understood in this way vanishes; its effervescence is extinguished. If this is how we hope for peace and justice (for example) then we will be disappointed.
Back to Brueggemann’s ‘but’; back to the acknowledgement that I am not the totality of everything that is; back to the realization that just beneath the surface of reality there is a faithfulness that cannot and will not fail. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel writes this: ‘hope is essentially an appeal to a creative power with which the soul feels herself to be in connivance’.
Hope is not a feeling, here today, gone tomorrow. Hope is faith in the reality of God and in the reality of the goodness of God – faith in the creative power which connives with us for the redemption of all creation. Abraham’s servant has faith and dares to hope; Jairus has faith and dares to hope; the unnamed woman has faith and dares to hope.
Because we have faith we also have hope, but in days like these, only because we have faith. Let us pray.