Easter Sunday

Professor Hunter's piece, see below, gives a Catholic perspective on the day. Hope, optimism, belief in a better future all spring from the same desire. Of course, one is then drawn back to the question posed in "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (elei elei lema sabachthanei): Matthew 27. The traditional answer is Matthew 28 but that answer does feel somehow bolted on as an afterthought. And even if not, certainly the despair expressed is very real, and the forsaking not just apparent.

Ian Hunter: Easter and the triumph of hope over despair

March 23, 2008, Ian Hunter

Easter Sunday is the holiest day in the Christian calendar, representing the triumph of hope over despair, of life over death.

As it happens, two recent and unrelated events have called public attention to hope, hope being one of the three theological virtues — faith and love the other two.

First, U. S. Senator Barack Obama has made hope a central theme (along with "change") of his campaign for the presidential nomination.
Second, Pope Benedict XVI made hope the subject of his most recent encyclical (Spe Salvi), released just before Christmas.

I think it is safe to predict that the Pope's encyclical will be pondered long after Barack Obama's campaign.

The Pope begins by reminding readers that the greatest Christian evangelist, St. Paul, told the Romans "you are saved by hope" (Romans 8:24). Hope is a gift from God, says the Pope, a trustworthy gift, a gift that enables men and women to survive in arduous, uncertain times.

Hope is a key word in Scripture — in fact, in scripture it is often used interchangeably with faith. So to have hope, or to have faith, is to have received a divine gift. St. Paul told the church at Ephesus that before their encounter with Christ they were "without hope," or, as Pope Benedict expresses it "in a dark world facing a dark future." But the light of Christ illuminates the darkness and assures that they have a future. Oh, true, much of that future remains hidden; "it is not that [Christians] know the details of what awaits them," the Pope writes, "but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness."

To come to know God, says Pope Benedict, is to encounter hope. The earliest Christians — for the most part poor people, uneducated and oppressed — had nothing to hope for, apart from the resurrection of Jesus. What they had was the assurance, often received directly from the apostles who had been there and seen it, that the tomb that once contained the body of Jesus was empty. That was Christian hope, and armed with that hope this ragtag brigade turned the world upside down with a crazy allegiance to another King, an upside-down King, this Jesus, the carpenter's son from Nazareth.

So for the early Christians hope was not a "not yet" kind of hope, rather an "already happened" hope. The Pope explains how the Catholic understanding of hope provides "even now something of the reality that we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a 'proof' of things that are still not seen."

What is the "present reality" of Christian hope?

Well, God's Church — universal, apostolic, tracing its origin to Christ's own words and to its first Primate, Peter. And the Eucharist, by which we come to share in Christ's body and blood. And the peace of Christ, not that peace which the politician on the campaign trail purports to offer, but rather a peace that passes understanding.

In the section of the encyclical entitled "The True Shape of Christian Hope," Pope Benedict draws a distinction between the material and the ethical realms of life. In the material realm, he says, we observe "continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature." But no comparable mastery can occur in the ethical realm because "man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew." Therefore, "the moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed"; man's earthy hopes, and his freedoms, always remain fragile and conditional.

Senator Barack Obama holds out the prospect of hope to an American electorate that is cynical about politicians, dispirited by current prospects, and uncertain about the future. Pope Benedict, by contrast, offers a hope that Christians for two millennia have tested in their daily lives, however perilous or oppressive their personal circumstances might be.

The essence of Christian hope was best summed up in a few words when Jesus said: "In this world, you will have tribulation. Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world."

Catholic Christians have double cause for rejoicing: in hope, and in having in Pope Benedict someone who can express that hope with such conviction, eloquence, and humility.

— Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.

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