Not
long after I was ordained there was a program on TV, a chat show,
which had four young priests talking about their experience of
priesthood and the Church today. I was one of the priests. The reason
why I mention it, is because I was really struck by the response that
I got from people afterwards. Many of the people who wrote to me or
phoned me were priests and they nearly all had the same thing to say;
they were delighted to hear people being so positive about the
Church. They were greatly encouraged. It gave them hope.
This
really made me think to myself just how much people are looking for
hope at the moment, how much we need hope. We need a reason to get up
in the morning. We need a reason to keep going when we are suffering.
And our reason is that we believe in God and in what God has promised
us. We seem to live in a world of despair, where all we hear is bad
news, how many people have been killed, where the latest war is…
Is it any wonder so many young people have committed suicide in the
last few years. They have no hope, they think there is nothing to
live for and this is very sad.
When
you look around you at the moment it would be easy to think that God
has lost the battle and that Satan has won. Evil has been victorious
and God has been defeated. Could this be possible? Of course not. God
cannot be defeated, ever and we must realize this is true. Even if we
can’t understand why there is so much evil around at the moment, be
sure of this, God is still very much in control.
One
way that we can be sure of this is through the inspired Word of God,
the Sacred Scriptures. The Word of God is truth, not just nice ideas,
because it comes from God. In many places in the Bible, it says that
God will not be defeated. In the beginning of St. John’s Gospel it
says, ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has
not/cannot overcome it.’ (John 1:6)
The
first reading of the mass today is a reading of great hope. It is a
reading that is often used at funerals. It is God’s promise to us
his people, that He has great things in store for us. ‘The Lord
will prepare a banquet for his people’; party, a feast. This is
what God has in store for us.
You
might say that it’s fine to quote the Bible, but how does that
apply to us in the ordinary things that we do each day? We don’t
seem to see any of these promises. Maybe we don’t allow God enough
space. It is easy to treat God as though He is there to serve our
needs. We ask for what we want and then we complain when we don’t
get it the way that suits us, but the closer we come to God the more
we see things in a different light. It doesn’t mean that everything
is suddenly alright, and all our problems are gone, but it does make
us see things differently. We also begin to realize that much of what
seemed impossible before is no longer impossible, because we don’t
rely on our own strength, but on God’s power to help us.
The
Apostles were unstoppable because they had learned to rely completely
on God and not on their own strength. If they continually focused on
the world around them, which I’m sure had just as many problems,
they probably wouldn’t have gotten very far. But their focus was
completely on God and that is why their work was so fruitful. There
was only twelve of them to start with and yet look what happened.
Our
hope is in God and that’s why even if someone is suffering
terribly, or sick and even if they die, we don’t despair, because
we know that God has not abandoned us. We believe that we will see
them again, because this is God’s promise to us. We have hope
because we believe.
Through
prayer Jesus continually shows us which way to go. He helps us with
our decisions and most of all He helps us never to be afraid, but
always to have hope in him. So if you wonder how can we have hope for
the Church and for the world, the answer is because we rely on God,
and not on ourselves.
‘The
light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’
(John 1:6)
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