One common characteristic of survivors of terrible disasters, either human or natural, is their hopefulness. Can we live a day without hope? Hope is not the same as a goal. A goal is what we can and should reach or accomplish. But we can still hope for things out of our control, such as life. Even at the bottom of tragedies, people still hope. As in the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, man is left with hope even when all kinds of evils fill our lives. Hope is a force to live. When a person has lost hope, he dies soon.
In the meantime, the man also hopes for life eternal. This human character is universal. Ancient people developed a very keen sense of the afterlife. We find so many ancient artifacts and remnants all over the world describing their ideas of the afterlife. There is no ancient religion that doesn’t speak about the afterlife. Almost instinctively, man hopes for an afterlife, which doesn’t face another death. However, the confirmation of this hope remains far beyond man’s power.
God didn’t leave the man alone. As we hear from the first reading today, God revealed life eternal to Abraham and his descendants. But it became clear that man could not have eternal life naturally. Imagine all evil people could live eternally after this life! And most of us find ourselves not deserving life eternal because we have sinned. Thus, the hope for eternal life necessarily includes the hope for a redeemer. Only the Son of God could accomplish the redemption by his blood. And he proved the indestructible life at his glorious resurrection.
This is the Christian hope that we share that indestructible life of Christ after this world. And as mentioned, this hope is also not a goal we can achieve by our power or work. But it’s not wishful thinking, either. Life eternal is reality Jesus already shown to us at his resurrection. The Christian hope is a virtue by which we entrust ourselves to the goodness and mercy of the Lord for life eternal. We will never see our hope come true in this life. But Christ has already shown the risen life. Then, this hope becomes a force of Christian perseverance in this life.
