What does it mean to preach with hope? Popular uses of the term hope complicate this question. Americans tend to view hope as a synonym for optimism. I hope that I win the lottery. I hope that my team wins the national championship. I hope that I’ll be able to get a job that allows me to feed my family.

The conflation of hope with optimism, though, is inadequate for the Christian. Optimism proposes that, in the long run, everything works out. You didn’t get the job. That’s OK, there’s another job around the corner. You didn’t win the lotto? Buy another ticket next week, surely you’re going to get yours at some point. Notre Dame didn’t win the national championship — well, there’s always next year.

Of course, you don’t need to be a Christian to know that not everything works out. Sometimes, people are diagnosed with terminal cancer. Sometimes, marriages end. Sometimes, there is war and disease.

In such situations, the false hope of optimism is insufficient. Christianity doesn’t preach that it’s all going to be OK. Instead, Christian preaching is grounded in something different — even when it’s not OK, when the darkness seems especially perilous, when you feel absolutely defeated, God is there with you. Into the darkness comes the Lord of life, who gives us hope because this God loved us unto the end.

The Reality of Life

If a preacher is to offer this kind of hope, he must begin with the reality of human life.

Now, let me be clear. Human life is not reducible to suffering. There are countless moments of delight if we open our eyes to notice them. The presence of the sun on a warm spring day, as the earth begins the great thaw. The first smile of a child gazing upon her mother. The celebration of marriage and its anniversaries, a hopeful gift of fidelity that extends over decades. In such moments, the goodness of God seems patent.

But there is suffering, some of it quite serious. As a priest stands to preach on any Sunday, in the assembly there might be newlyweds struggling with infertility; a couple dealing with their child’s suicide; parishioners worried that they will be fired from their job; adolescents fretting over the loss of friendships that were once viewed as permanent; migrants worried that they will be deported; people worried about the kind of gun violence that breaks out far too often in American culture.

There are several insufficient ways to respond to such suffering. Ignoring its presence implies that nothing in Christianity can address the deepest sorrows of the human heart. Telling the assembly that such things don’t matter because Jesus Christ died and rose again is at best naive and at worst sadistic. You’re telling suffering people that the anxiety they are experiencing, the worries that wake them up in the middle of the night, or the sorrow at the death of a loved one, aren’t really that important. They’re just passing feelings. Concentrate on the goodness of God, and everything will be OK.

This kind of preaching is anti-scriptural, ignoring the visceral language of the psalms of lament. The psalmist doesn’t treat suffering in an almost gnostic way, saying that it doesn’t matter, that it’s a mere ephemeral experience that will pass away. The feeling of rejection is significant enough that the psalmist tends to offer a comprehensive list. My enemies, they hate me. The unrighteous are flourishing, while I’m drowning in sorrow. My flesh and blood cries out in pain. And worst of all, God is silent through it all.

The hope, in such psalms of lament, only comes at the end. Such hope isn’t optimistic, at least not in the sense of optimism described above. It isn’t the kind of hope that says something like: “Hey, I know it’s bad. But if I try to adjust my attitude, it can get a bit better.” No, the only source of hope is that the God who acted before will act again. Even in my suffering, God will not abandon me. God will not abandon us.

The greatest reality of life is the fidelity of God, and for that reason alone, may I dare to hope.

Hope in the Crucified and Risen Lord

For the Christian, then, the source of our hope is nothing less than the kerygma, the proclamation of salvation that we ponder throughout the liturgical year.

Yes, we sinned. But God was faithful. Yes, our ancestors acted in less than virtuous ways. But God was faithful. God is faithful.

In the fullness of time, God revealed the depths of this fidelity in the person of Jesus Christ. God became man. Born in a stable in Bethlehem, chased away into Egypt, returning to Nazareth to live a hidden life, God took up all that it means to be human. He knew the sorrow of death, the pain of rejection and the line of darkness that runs through every human heart.

But he loved us. He loved us unto the end. God experienced all the darkness that the human heart, in union with the devil, could conjure up. He was hated. Spit upon. Insulted. Crucified. Died. And yet, he loved. He turned his death into a sacrifice, an act of love that shone a light upon the darkness.

Love, as we learn in Scripture, is stronger than death. The Son is raised from the dead, trampling down death by his death. The powers of darkness are defeated through the sacrificial gift of love of the Son. Even in this death, the most dreadful of all deaths of the righteous Son of God, God’s love can be found.

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the reason for our hope. This isn’t optimism. After all, the Son of God, the Word made flesh, really died. He was really crucified as the God-man. And his resurrection was not the end of human suffering for any of us.

There are still those of us who suffer.

There are those of us who get sick.

Those of us who are rejected, worried and afraid.

But in these moments, God is there. God still dwells in the darkest of places, not promising that the darkness will dissipate at once, but that Our Lord will be with us there, transforming darkness into light — slowly, surely, with the fidelity of a God who is the very measure of fidelity.

The hope that we preach is nothing but the Gospel! And it’s here that optimism is revealed as the true folly that it is. We Christians aren’t optimistic that everything is going to be all right, that a better future is around the corner. It might not be. But we know that no matter what happens, God still dwells among us. That, in the long span of human history, Christ’s resurrection has changed the plot of the story. Love wins.

The Last Things

Now, as long as we are pilgrims in this vale of tears, it won’t always be clear that Christ’s love has, in fact, conquered the powers of sin and death. Unrighteousness still seems to be rewarded. Death may have been defeated by Christ, but it still possesses at least a mild sting — as those of us who have lost a loved one can testify.

But there is an ultimate hope — even as we approach the darkness of our own death, we have hope that death is not the end of the story. Baptized into Christ Jesus, members of his Body, the resurrected Lord wants us to belong to him. Forever and ever, Amen.

We hope in heaven. But again, the sentimentalism of an optimistic faux hope can easily take over when we’re talking about heaven. Heaven is a place where we’re all super happy. Where we’re reunited with loved ones and our pets. Where whatever we love most on earth will be available to us in endless quantities.

That’s not heaven. That’s not eternal life.

Rather, we are made for a joy that transcends every delight that we’ve ever had in this world. That first cup of coffee in the morning. The moment when we return to our spouse after a long work trip. The vista that takes our breath away. It’s all wonderful, beautiful and delightful. Yet it also all passes away. The cup of coffee is emptied. Your spouse eventually dies. Your eyesight can be taken away.

This might make us sad, but conjoined to sadness is a desire for something more. I am made for a joy that transcends any moment of joy I might experience in the present.

What is this joy? The God who has been faithful to us throughout history wants to be faithful to us when everything passes away. Yes, in heaven, there will be no crying. There will be no tears or weeping. Because in heaven, God will be everything.

The triune God is the everything of the communion of saints, who live now in the city of the redeemed. This city is governed not by the politics of blame or fear, but through the politics of praise. God is everything, God is good, God is!

If we are to preach hope, we must preach eternal life. Not only some eternal life as a distant future for each individual soul, but the eternal life, the heavenly existence, that becomes possible even now. If we have the eyes to see it.

Yes, there is extraordinary suffering and even evil in this life. Think only of the many murders perpetuated by various regimes in the 20th and 21st centuries. But even here, the light of love can shine through. Think of Maxmillian Kolbe, who gave his life in exchange for the father of a child in one of the death camps. Or Carlo Acutis, who found a way to offer his sickness as a sacrifice of love. Out of darkness comes the heavenly hope of the saints.

A Prophetic Hope

In our day, when it’s easy to be captive to so many anxieties or worries (the economy, the government, the climate), optimism won’t do. Instead, we Christians dare to possess a prophetic hope. Such hope isn’t a naive sense that it’s all going to be OK. No, we know the story. There’s something wrong with this world. Creation is groaning in travail. Demonic forces still invite us to give our will over to the power of sin and death.

But the force of those powers has been defeated through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We know that Jesus Christ is the one Lord.

And when I experience the groans of death itself, I can have hope that I don’t suffer these alone. With me, through the Church and the sacraments, is Jesus Christ and the entire communion of saints — bringing me from the darkness of death to the new life of the resurrection.

Now that’s a prophetic hope, the kind that the Church and world alike need to hear preached on Sunday morning. 

TIMOTHY P. O’MALLEY, Ph.D., is the director of education at the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame.