Whispering Hope

Message from Fr. Jose Koluthara, CMI

Lord Jesus, help us proclaim the hope that you whisper in our ears, through our lives. Amen.

My Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Today’s readings whisper hope in our ears. In the first reading (Job 7:1-4,6-7), Job’s sad harangue might bring us down except for the fact that we know the rest of his story. Just when it seemed that Job could plunge no deeper into darkness and despair, something happened to change his heart. He encountered God, and from that encounter onward, Job began to look not just at himself and his struggles, he began to look to and listen to God. He was comforted by the inscrutable and awesome mystery of a universe he had not created and could not understand. In a word, he began to hope, and in his hoping he learned to trust and fling himself and his sufferings headlong into God’s hands.

When Jesus moved in flesh and blood among us, he offered the same hope: hope in him, hope in God, hope for salvation and for healing and forgiveness. In today’s Gospel (Mk 1:29-39), Jesus offers hope in various ways – through the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, through his power over evil as seen in his cures of those possessed, through his prayer in a lonely place that prepared and equipped him for continued service and through his proclamation of the good news throughout the synagogues and villages of Galilee. In each of these efforts, Jesus communicated to human beings the love of God that enabled them to hope.

In today’s second reading (1Cor 9:16-19,22-23), Paul describes the hope that enables him to keep preaching even when this brought him rejection, misery and disillusionment. Like Jeremiah (20:7-9), his predecessor in ministry, Paul knew that he was only a messenger of God’s word. Hope drove Paul; hope pushed and pulled Paul along and empowered him to preach, even when logic and practicality would have dictated otherwise.

A similar hope enabled another minister of the Gospel nearer to our time to persevere despite widespread opposition to his hope for a “new Pentecost” within the church. One of the key figures of the Second Vatican Council, Leo-Josef Cardinal Suenens of Belgium once declared himself and his hope in these words: “I am a man of hope, not for human reasons not from any neutral optimism, but I believe the Holy Spirit is at work in the church and in the world, even when unrecognized and unnamed… To hope is not to dream but to turn dreams into reality. Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.”