Pilgrims of Hope
As we return to school so soon after Holy Week, and the world momentarily pauses to remember and grieve Pope Francis, perhaps this is a moment to reflect on what it means to live in the hope of the resurrection.
Before his death, Francis declared the theme of 2025, (a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church), to be “Pilgrims of Hope”; an invitation for Catholics worldwide to reflect on and extend Christian hope to a hurting and fractured world.
But what is it about Christian hope, that when properly understood, means we have something meaningful to offer others?
And how can we embody this virtue and promise in such a way that we walk as Pilgrims of Hope through our school corridors and communities, despite the pressures we feel and challenges we face?
Through the Old Testament, the scriptures teach that hope is not optimism based on circumstance, but rather trust grounded in the goodness and character of God. The two Hebrew words most frequently translated as hope are Yakhal and Qavah, both of which mean to wait expectantly.
It was this that allowed the Prophet Hosea, living in a dark time when Israel was oppressed by foreign empires, to declare that God could “transform this Valley of Trouble into a door of hope…as in the time when she came out of the land of Egypt” (Hosea 2:15). Here Hosea is recalling the Exodus story, how God had stepped in and redeemed his people in impossible circumstances before.
In the New Testament, we see how the resurrection changes everything for the early apostles. They were convinced that Jesus’ life, death and resurrection was God’s surprising response to our slavery to evil and death. The empty tomb opened up a new door of hope and they used the greek word Elpis which can be translated as “profound certainty” to describe this anticipation.
It was this that allowed the Apostle Peter, writing to Christians who had already “suffered grief in all kinds of trials” and were now in the midst of a “fiery ordeal” to dare say that Jesus’ resurrection opened up a “living hope”. (1 Peter 1:3-7). As they put their faith in the resurrection, this hope became hardwired into their DNA, becoming such a part of who they were that they could face anything.
Indeed this had been Peter and the apostles' own lived experience. Their encounter with the risen Lord and subsequent baptism of the Holy Spirit transformed them from cowering in a locked upper room to fearlessly preaching the power of the resurrection in the very place where their leader had been crucified by the authorities (Acts 2).
As the late scripture teacher, Tim Keller notes in his book “Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and Meaning of Easter”:
“There are the good things of this world, the hard things of this world and the best things of this world - God’s love, glory, holiness and beauty. The Bible’s teaching is that the road to the best things is not through the good things but usually through the hard things, as Jesus himself shows us. There is no message more contrary to the way the world understands life or more subversive to its values. A simplistic worldview or dependance on the good things will lead you to collapse into despair or cynicism in the face of suffering. But if you see that God is the God of the Great Reversal - the God who brings life out of death, resurrection after crucifixion, the God who makes the last to be first and the first to be last - you will be able to take heart and be of good courage. If we remember this, we can face anything...The thing the resurrection overcomes is the fear that we will not be sufficient to face all the other fears. The resurrection does not promise that the circumstances of life will go smoothly, but it does give us hope that we can be turned into the kind of people who can handle whatever comes.”
That, pilgrims of hope, regardless of what the coming term may hold, is the resurrection truth we can choose to walk in.