Christ Our Hope

'I go to prepare a place for you. And if I shall go, and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and will take you to myself; that where I am, you also may be.' (St John, 14:2b, 3)

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STL, STD, Professor of Theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville

For all the turmoil of the times in which we live, our lives nevertheless remain secure because they are filled with the expectation that God has already gone to prepare a place for us.

For those of us fortunate enough to be annealed in hope, our horizons shaped by the Event of Jesus Christ, the situation we face can be stated quite simply. That for all the turmoil of the times in which we live, from a collapsing culture to a politics poisoned by hate, our lives nevertheless remain secure—entirely serene even—because they are filled with the expectation that God has already gone to prepare a place for us. We need not fear, therefore, anything along the way.  

This is because we believe, as Catholics, that the longings we have for the joy of an eternal companionship with Christ, not leaving behind those we have loved and lost on the way, has in some deeply mysterious way already begun. In other words, the Great Epiphany we await in hope is one whose lineaments, however fragmentary or inchoate they may appear at the moment, are in our midst even now. 

The bright tokens of hope are all about us and may be found in every sacramental encounter we have. Glints of divine glory have long since been strewn about our world. And while a full and final unfolding beckons us beyond this world, the firstfruits of God’s largess have not been withheld from this world. Yes, we continue to hunger and thirst for that fullness of life and love promised by God; yet, even amid these shadows, languishing as we must in a Vale of Tears, we find much on which to feed and find solace.

Here is how the late Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete once put it, prompted by an optimism wholly rooted in Christ, in a set of promises from which all the baptized are to take their marching orders. “We cannot proceed,” he writes, 

from the perspective of a battle that has not already been won. All our cultural activities should have as a point of departure our own conviction, our own certainty that the cultural battle, if I may put it that way, has already been won by Christ.

If we assume this to be so, argues Albacete, how then can we possibly be afraid? What have we got to worry about from a culture war that has already been won? “All we have to do,” he advises, “is give witness to that victory.” Which cannot happen, of course, can make no difference whatsoever, “unless we experience the reality of that victory within our own lives and hearts. Otherwise,” he tells us, “it’s just words…”

What it all comes down to in the end is whether or not we are willing to testify to the truth of what Christ came to establish, which is nothing less than total victory. Are we prepared to make that claim, to declare on the strength of Christ’s conquest of the cosmos, that we need have no fear of anything or anyone anymore?  

Albacete is very clear about this, asking, in effect, if what we have signed on for we really do believe. Do we accept this truth or not?

That the new life that he has made possible, totally unimaginable and unforeseen, is a reality? That I can have certain access to it? That it doesn’t depend on my moods and emotions, but that there are objective moments in space and time called the sacraments in which I come into contact with this new way of life…? 

If such be the case, he concludes, then it necessarily follows that 

every Mass and any sacrament will be like the sign of the house of Mary in Nazareth that has the well-known proclamation of the Gospel, Verbum caro factum est, “the Word became flesh,” but in that place there’s one little word added to it that’s different—hic, namely “here.” “Here the Word became flesh.” “Here.”

This, then, is how we are to proceed. It must be as if, quoting T.S. Eliot, “Here and there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion…”

What matters, then, as it has always mattered right from the start, is that we anchor our lives, our attention, upon that which is most real, most efficacious, namely, the inbreaking of God into our broken world. He is here…now…always. His tent has long been pitched among us, and He has no intention of leaving.  

It is not so complicated after all. That God alone is the One who, having decisively overcome the world, relieves us of every possible fear and anxiety in it. Not as an event from out of the distant past, a past dead and buried, which the experts have somehow unearthed, dusted off, then shipped to the nearest museum in order to fill a couple of rooms with the memorabilia of an antique religion.   

It was never like that at all. And, besides, how antique can a religion be whose point of origin is a Crucified Jew who actually knew how to climb out of a grave three days after His executioners consigned His corpse to rot in it? “I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge,” writes G.K. Chesterton. 

Of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art;
But when My love rises like a sea,
I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man
To formulate a blessing…
When from the deeps a dying God astounded
Angels and devils who do but die.  

As that supremely Catholic theologian St. John the Divine superbly reminds us in his First Letter:

Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. (1 John 3:2-3)

Our world has long been a place of wedding, a nuptial union, where the Bridegroom, God, having once joined us to Himself in a sacred marital embrace, will not let go, will not suffer His Bride to go off alone. That is the ground of our hope, and unless we give in, choosing despair over hope, the world cannot take it from us.