Hope

Hope

Biblical hope

The Lord supports those who falter and raises up whoever has fallen. Everyone's eyes are turned to you waiting and you provide them food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the hunger of every living person".
(Ps 144 [145], 4, 13-15).

The history of the people of God, from its origins, is the story of a people that hopes, it is the story of a hope that manifests itself and grows day after day, year after year, century after century. It is the story of those who lived and live in hope.
"The Lord said to Noah:" Enter into the ark you with all your family, for I have seen you righteous before me in this generation: of every animal world take with you seven pairs, the male and its female [. ..] because in seven days I will rain on earth for forty days and forty nights, I will exterminate from the earth every being I have done. "Noah did what the Lord had commanded him"
(Gn 7: 1-5).

Without hesitation, after having built the ark according to the provisions that God himself had dictated to him, Noah embarked his family, chose and arranged in the hold the animals two by two, and waited for the beginning of the rains. The flood lasted forty days, as the Lord had said. Forty days when the waters grew visibly and worryingly: first they raised the ark from the mainland, then covered everything, every plant, every mountain, and went up, rose again, higher and higher until “they exceeded by fifteen cubits the mountains that they had covered".

Every object, every living being was finally buried and exterminated by that mass of water, "only Noah remained and those who were with him in the ark.The waters remained high above the earth one hundred and fifty days" (Gn 7: 23-24). To think of it with a cold mind, this is a story that still today makes the skin crawl: who gave Noah all that courage, what did not push him on the abyss of fear and despair, what convinced him to believe that life would one day restarted just from him and with him? Why continue to hope, and still hope that they would be saved, he and his family, despite that infinity of water that enveloped them?

"Then the Lord said to Abraham, after Lot had separated from him:" Lift up your eyes and from the place where you are looking to the north and south, to the east and the west. You see, I will give it to you and to your descendants forever ... [...] Stand up, walk the country far and wide, because I will give it to you. "Then Abraham moved with his tents [.. .] "(Gn 13, 14-17). Abraham is conscious of responding immediately and concretely to the will of his Lord; he keeps his saddlebag and curtains ready to be collected, to leave as soon as the Lord commands it. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, recalls how Abraham "had faith hoping against every despair and thus became the father of many peoples, as he was told"
(Rom 4:18).

Abraham had therefore set out on a journey, "as the Lord had commanded him", and had also brought his nephew Lot, son of his brother Aran, with him. With it he traveled all over the Negeb and reached as far as Egypt, before returning back to the land of Canaan. But the riches of tents and herds of Abraham and Lot did not allow them to maintain a peaceful cohabitation for long: Abraham turned to the Lord for advice on what to do; Lot, however, dazzled by the beauty that has always distinguished the valley of the Jordan, before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, decided to take possession of that wonderful "garden", transporting its tents to the east in the country of Canaan. Lot then separated from Abraham, settling near Sodom.

Traveling with Abraham, in search of realization as Abraham, eager to see the promise of the Lord fulfilled as Abraham, however, Lot is not a satisfied man: what has been given is not enough for him, he has something more, to have everything and immediately; at the sight of the valley of the Jordan he deludes himself of having already found "his" promised land and stops there; it is a justifiable illusion (the journey is tiring and unrewarding), but still dictated by a choice of convenience, dictated by that "wanting everything and immediately".

In fact, this contenting immediately gives rise to further dissatisfaction. Abraham, on the other hand, remembers the words of the Lord and of the works already accomplished: he knows that the "promise", however difficult it is to achieve, is that chosen for his own good and his people; he does not let himself be discouraged by the difficulties, facing hopefully and trustfully all the adversities of his pilgrimage; in moments of greatest despair he stops to build an altar, to pray and ask for advice.

And the reward for loyalty shown is great; that who so desired and who now no longer dared even to hope, comes as a gift from heaven, as thanks from that God who Abraham in turn never ceases to thank: "Sarah, your wife will give birth to a son and you will call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant, to be his God and his descendants after him".
(Genesis 17, 19).

But what will Abraham's thoughts be before this latest promise? Can you still trust the words of the Lord? Is it really possible that he will one day have an heir, blood of his blood, generated by his own flesh? At that moment Abraham knows he can not have children: both he and Sara are older now and the laws of nature, which Abraham knows well, remind him that no living being is able to generate offspring after having passed the fertile period; reasonableness, therefore, could have suggested him not to deceive himself, not to be deceived, even if those were the words of his Lord. That being the case, it would have been lawful for Abraham to think that God's was not a real promise; perhaps it was only the umpteenth trial to which God was subjecting him, to see to what extent a desire so strong, like that of having his own heir, would have blinded him and led him to believe that what was said, for his satisfaction and not divine, it would be realized.

Who among us today, faced with a similar promise, would have blindly believed the words spoken? Who would not have immediately clung to the tests of science and biology to prove with certainty the impossibility of their realization? Abraham, however, does not feel deceived by the Lord, he immediately believes that, being a promise of God, it would be realized; full of hope, he immediately set to work to carry out what the Lord requires of him so that those words can be realized in the established times.

The vicissitudes of Abraham and Noah, like those of many other patriarchs, as they were held in different times and places, have at least one point in common: they believed blindly living God's will to the end, allowing them to see the respective promises. This was their secret: to believe blindly. And this could also be our secret, our strength: the faith placed in the Lord and in his words overcomes any fear, "faith is the foundation of things hoped for and proof of those that are not seen [...].

By faith Noah, divinely warned of things that were not yet seen, moved by pious fear, he prepared an ark for the salvation of his family; and for this faith he condemned the world and became heir to righteousness according to faith. By faith Abraham, called by God, obeyed leaving for a place he was to receive as an inheritance, and he left without knowing where he was going [...]. By faith, even Sara, although out of age, received the opportunity to become a mother, because she believed that he had promised her".
(Heb 11, 1-2, 7-11).

The world in which we live places us constantly in the face of doubts, fears, crises, the most dangerous of which is the concrete risk of losing the meaning of life itself. Many of us today have already lost it and are not even aware of it, because they have found, or they delude themselves, that they have found a way out of their despair in unrestrained consumerism, in drugs, in alcohol, in the uninhibited choices of a life, without limits and without morals. They believe they have conquered freedom and with it happiness, but the result is a profound sadness, an emptiness in the heart that often leads to an irresolvable desperation. To build life on solid foundations, capable of resisting those trials that will never fail, unable to make us fall into the abyss of non-hope, we must cling to the "rock", have faith in the Lord and his teachings, open the hearts to his word: "Verily, verily I say unto you, you will see heaven open and the angels of God ascend and descend upon the Son of man [...]. Do what he tells you".
(Jn 1, 51 e 2, 5).