Saturday in the Twenty-Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Cycle I
Rm 4, 13-18; Lk 12, 8-12.
One of the most beautiful events of nature that you can ever come across is that of a bird feeling her hatchlings. The mother bird goes out in search for food she she ingests and even partially digests before passing it on to her young who are waiting for her with their little beaks open wide.
I think that this image can help us understand also the work of St Paul in his 13 letters. In these letters, he passes on to the young, newly founded Christian communities what he has understood and dwelt upon from the Hebrew Scriptures and from Christ's teaching (the Gospels were not yet in their final form). Therefore the teaching in his letters are distilled through his own experience, through the struggles that he faced in his own faith and applied in concrete ways to the particular community he is addressing.
The letter to the Romans which the Church offers for our reflection throughout this past week and for the weeks to come is no exception. In today's scant verses, Paul dwells on the two virtues of faith and hope, and the interplay between them, offering Abraham as an exemplar for us.
Hope is the hallmark of the Christian. Hope is not being naive and neither is it wishful thinking. Paul uses the famous phrase "hoping against hope." You would recall how in Chapter 12 of Genesis, out of the blues, God speaks to Abraham and makes this covenant with him. At that moment he was the only person on earth holding God's promise in his heart. What would have happened had he not hoped? What would have happened hadn't he had faith in God?
Abraham's heart was a flame of hope. A small flame, which could easily be put out by any breeze of doubt. Yet he guarded this faith by "hoping against hope." In a similar way, Paul keeps this flame of hope burning in his heart and is anxious to spread this flame of hope among Christians.
Like Abraham, like Paul, we often find ourselves in situations where, for some reason or other, we are the only ones who can hope. In situations like these, even our flame of hope can be easily put out by doubt and fears. But let us not get discouraged. Let up "hope against hope" and in doing so, pave the way for the coming of the Kingdom of God among us.
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