“Hope does not disappoint us” (Rom. 5:5).
What is St. Paul talking about when he says, “Hope does not disappoint us” (Rom. 5:5)? That’s crazy: anyone who has ever hoped for anything knows what it is to be disappointed, to have one’s hopes dashed, to have one’s dreams disappear in a moment. If you haven’t had this experience your hopes may be too modest, your expectations too low. Or you may just be out of touch with yourself, unaware of your own hopes and in denial of what it means for them to be disappointed. St. Paul seems far off base, here in the Letter to the Romans, a bit unrealistic, in seeming to discount what we know to be true.
The disappointment of our hopes is part of our common human experience. I venture to say that everyone here knows what I’m talking about. But let’s hear it for hope, disappointed or not! The philosopher Aristotle wrote that “hope is the dream of a waking man”: which reminds us that hope is what is kindled in us at the beginning of the day, by the offer of what lies ahead.
Hope comes to birth with a glimpse of the unrealized prospect before us. St. Paul writes a little bit later that “hope that is seen is not hope” (Rom. 8:24). In other words, what is hoped for lies ahead in the future, and in what has not yet been seen and grasped. That’s what makes hope to be hope. “For who hopes for what is seen?” (Rom. 8:24), Paul says. If we held it in our hand we would no longer need to hope for it because our hope would be realized. Then Paul adds, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25).
The mention of patience, a word rooted in the Latin word for suffering, points toward the human experience of hope that remains unrealized, of what still lies outside our grasp. That’s the painful part of hope. In our reading today, St. Paul is not really being unrealistic about the nature of human hope. There’s a redemptive moment here, readily acknowledged, in patient waiting; in the formation of character, as Paul says: “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character” (Rom. 5:3-4). He’s not being unrealistic at all.
As St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty… I can do all things through him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:11-13). In the midst of hope deferred, of a hope that is not yet grasped (which seems to be the nature of hope), we can learn to be content. It can be a redemptive moment. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Luke, “By your endurance you will gain your souls” (Lk. 21:19). Or as in our Gospel reading today, “The one who endures to the end shall be saved” (Matt. 10:22).
Finally, let’s get back to the hope that does not disappoint us, as St. Paul says. Human hope is disappointed all the time, for sure; but Paul is talking about the hope we have in God. This hope cannot disappoint us. It takes on board all the rest of what the apostle has to say about the difficulty of patient endurance; of the redemptive quality of suffering; about the possibility of being content in the midst of it all. Yet the hope that St. Paul is talking about is ultimately rooted in God.
God is trustworthy for the future; God is dependable in ways that we are not. We have our agenda and our hopes, but God is the one who has determined the future, just as surely as he guides the present and established the past. It’s really God’s agenda and not our own. God has greater things in plan for us that far exceed our own hopes. Hope in God cannot disappoint us because it’s bigger than we are; bigger than what we can imagine.
Hope in God spurs us on to the kingdom and the promise that God has prepared for us. It’s a hope that is “out of this world” but which we enjoy here and now, because we are people of hope. We’re convinced, as St. Paul says a little later at the end of the eighth chapter, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39). That’s the hope that does not disappoint us.