Hopelessness

A few weeks ago a friend and I went on a late-season cycle through Smuggler’s Notch.  It was a reasonable nice day when we started out but became cooler and a little damp towards the end of the ride.  As a result I was anxious to get back to where we had parked the car.  I knew approximately how far the whole ride would be and had some idea how far we had gone from the readings on my cycle computer, but it was all approximation.  Towards the end I was looking expectantly around every bend and at the top of every hill hoping to see my car.  I was eventually rewarded.

This is what it is like, I think, to travel in hope, eagerly looking toward the goal. The experience of hope here is an active anticipation.   I was pedaling and looking.  It was not just a passive wishing for my car to be where I was.   Christian hope is the same sort of thing.  I think this is a little of what St. Paul was saying when he said:

Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:12-14 ESV)

My goal – my car- was there but I had not yet obtained it.   I pedaled in some discomfort, but in hope.

We travel in hope.  Unless, of course, we do not.  Hopelessness is a serious soul-sickness and there are two kinds. The first is despair, the attitude of soul that has decided, “It ain’t gonna happen.”  Translated to my bike ride it is the statement either that I’m not going to make it to my car, or more irrationally, my car isn’t there.

I think that we understand despair and its problems.  It truly feels like hopelessness.

The other flavor of hopelessness is presumption.  St Paul is not presumptuous. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect.”  Presumption says, “I’m already there.  It has already happened.”  Pushing the cycling motif, it is to stop pedaling because we are already arrived.  If I had done that, I would still be cold and wet, and by now, quite hungry as well.

Presumption is hopelessness because it forgets that we are still traveling.  There is no place for hope if we are already at our destination.  I think we can see it in the spiritual life in two ways.  The first is the presumption of the Pharisees,  “I am following the rules and being basically a good person, I have arrived.”  I am not pedaling now because I have pedaled enough. 

The other kind of presumption is that of the Israelites, as we read it in the book of Nehemiah.  There people of Israel and Judah has made the assumption that, since they were God’s chosen people, there was no more pedaling needed.  Speaking of the Israelites who has come our of Egypt, Nehemiah says, “But they and our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck and did not obey your commandments.” (Nehemiah 9:16 ESV)

I think that happens to many Christians today.  We have made our decision for Jesus and are assured of our salvation (of the goal at the end) and therefore there is no need to try to change or grow.  We can continue in our broken patterns of relating because, well, we’re saved!  We need not be self-reflective or examine ourselves because we have already made the goal.  Not only is this presumptuous, but it tends to make us jerks.  It was Jesus who reminded us that not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven.

“I press on,” says St. Paul, “to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”  If you are still breathing, there is more pedaling to do.

There is only one place where there is no hope.  Dante knew it and in his picture of hell the words, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” are inscribed above its entrance.  It is fair to say that our experience of hopelessness is a hint of the flavor of hell.

But to travel in hope, even when the going is hard or wet or cold, is to anticipate heaven.  And heaven has a way of reaching backwards to meet us.