Astonishing Hope

Jesus stood before the congregation in Nazareth, Luke tells us, and read the text from Isaiah which begins, "The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor."

Those present knew a great deal about bad news and about poverty. The news to which they were accustomed was news of hunger, of the abusive activities of occupation soldiers and the immense problems of being tenant farmers subject to absentee landlords and their local agents; news of the growing burden of taxes which paid the cost of their own subjection, of fresh acts of collaboration by religious and political leaders with the Romans, of beatings and executions. Jesus' hearers were people systematically humiliated. Many must have painfully felt the silence and even absence of God, and sensed the abandonment of creation, the abandonment of God's own faithful people, to the power of death.

The context in which the good news was announced was a situation of despair. Jews could readily experience their lives as being in the end time. Jesus, in his teaching, did not challenge that sensibility but rather taught how to live in an end time, how to become faithful in an end time.

We also live in an end time. The Utopian expectations celebrated at the twentieth century's beginning seem to us far more distant and unimaginable than pharaohs and sphinxes. The century became a habitat of nightmares, a time of despair.

Some of the words and phrases that reveal the reasons for the widespread sense of dread include:

World War I, World War II, Verdun, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Siege of Leningrad, Hitler, Stalin, Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Berlin Wall; tiger cages, My Lai, the Christmas Bombing, and the Plain of Jars; the SS-20, the cruise missile, the MX, the Minuteman II, the neutron bomb, and the Trident submarine; thalidomide, cancer, and plutonium.

To pronounce such words is to pronounce a litany of unbearable sorrows. The words fall on consciousness the way industrial acid rains fall on the limestone surfaces of old cathedrals, eating away those surfaces that celebrated human hope. The words strip us of those optimisms that have falsely been called "hope": humanistic visions of reason overcoming ignorance, distances, hunger, war, squalor, all our inventions and traditions of institutionalized suffering.

How does the acid rain of bad news affect us? Let me share three brief stories:

An American Roman Catholic bishop told me of an encounter with a group of students 15 and 16 years old. He asked how many were hoping to be parents one day. Only a few raised their hands. In the conversation that followed, several of the students explained rather dispassionately that nuclear war seemed inevitable before the end of the century. It seemed unfair to bring children into a world in which there was so little hope that they could grow up.

I met a woman who had been a counselor at a New York City abortion center; she later became a pacifist and part of a project encouraging women to continue with pregnancies despite economic or other difficulties. Among various reasons she encountered for abortion from those she counseled was their expectation of nuclear war.

In the late 1970s a visitor to my office described a demonstration against nuclear weapons in the United States, during which an account of the horrors suffered by the people of Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded was read aloud. Our visitor noticed a young father fall on his knees, holding a small child in his arms. The father wept. Afterward, when our guest went over to talk with him, the man explained, "I was weeping over the dead body of my own child. I was weeping because I live in a world in which the leaders are preparing to burn our children."

Religious people, even religious peacemakers, often keep silent about such signs of the time. Perhaps we fear to speak of despair because we see a danger that our words will make our lack of hope only more contagious. Perhaps we are silent because we too are so vulnerable; we feel trapped and powerless, and we think God is as powerless as we are.

Significant exceptions to the silence are persons who see peacemaking as a process of healing in which response to fear is crucial. One of these is Henri Nouwen, who wrote in his book, Clowning in Rome, about contemporary life:

[It is a world] clouded with an all-pervading fear, a growing sense of despair, and the paralyzing awareness that humanity has come to the verge of suicide. We no longer have to ask ourselves if we are approaching a state of emergency. We are in the midst of it here and now.

You do not have to be a great prophet to say that coming decades will likely see not only more wars, more hunger, and more oppression, but also desperate attempts to escape them all. We have to be prepared for a period in which suicide will be as widespread as drugs are now, in which new types of flagellants will roam the country frightening the people with the announcement of the end of all things, and in which new exotic cults with intricate rituals will try to ward off a final catastrophe. We have to be prepared for an outburst of new religious movements using Christ's name for the most un-Christian practices. In short, we have to be prepared to live in a world in which fear, suspicion, mutual hatred, physical and mental torture, and an increasing confusion will darken the hearts of millions of people.

Grace Over Fear
Fear can have a genuine and even creative function. There are realities which appropriately awaken fear. And fear, like an alarm clock, awakens us; it arouses conscience and response, revives and reshapes our vocations.

But alarm clocks are useful for only a few moments; they are not meant to ring throughout the day. When fear becomes a constant howling, instead of awakening us, it paralyzes and deadens us. Imagination and conscience, rather than being stirred to life, are stunted. The expectation of unparalleled catastrophe can take root in us in such a way that what we dread becomes more certain in our psychological and spiritual surrender to fear.

It is fear which initiates our dependence on weapons and provokes us to develop systems of manipulation and greed, creating occasions for war. It is fear that constantly animates the arms race and fuels lusts for power. Beneath layers of economics and ideology lies the bedrock of fear.

It is the fear that events have gone too far, that it is now "too late," that so often imprisons a response. We too may be among the prisoners Jesus spoke of that day in Nazareth. To the extent that fear is at the center of our lives, we too are blinded and chained.

Fear, always infectious, becomes more so in our present context. There is not a soul alive who is not imprisoned by war and the massive preparations for war. The world itself has become the target of war. Everyone lives upon the target.

The shadow of the possibility of a final, human-authored holocaust erodes even the normal and ancient joys. The face of a child, the petals of a flower, the most breathtaking works of art--everywhere there is the gray shadow. Everything, everyone is condemned to burn. Daniel Berrigan, in a poem, comments, "They have taken away our joy."

It was Leon Bloy who observed, "Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God."

The good news Jesus announced in Nazareth is the news that gives us back our joy, our hope, our ability to discern the presence of God. It gives us the courage to see, to liberate, to share our lives, to share the land and its fruit with the generosity of God.

The good news is an experience of healing. As fear retreats to a more useful location, away from the center of our lives, hope and courage takes its place. This is the normal activity of grace. It is a healing event which, though rooted in ourselves, has its branches in the community.

It is not unimportant that Jesus so often taught in parables. Through the parables one could more easily see the ordinary miracle of God's involvement in our lives.

In trying to talk about a spiritual transformation in ourselves which could lead us toward an authentic hope, I cannot help but think of parables--experiences of the activity of God in my life and the life of friends.

One parable concerns Mel Hollander, who in the late 1960s was in Vietnam as an American civilian social worker. Doctors discovered that Mel was suffering from a cancer of the lymph system and estimated that he had, at most, six months to live. Mel, a promising writer in his early 20s, had already been dispirited by the climate of death in Vietnam and was deeply depressed by its sudden invasion of his own body.

He went to New York in hopes of a medical cure. His doctors found no hope.

He heard of a course at Union Theological Seminary for those who would be working with the dying. Mel went to the seminary to register for it. While there, he heard that another course--this one on the seemingly more esoteric subject of John's Book of Revelation--was being offered by Daniel Berrigan. As self-pitying as Mel was at the time, there was still in him some of the curiosity that had led him to Vietnam. Mel arrived at the appointed classroom for the Berrigan lecture. Other students arrived. Dan Berrigan arrived. The hour for the class to start arrived. And it passed. The room was silent and still. Mel didn't realize that it was Dan's custom to begin his classes with a brief period of meditative silence. The silence made Mel terribly nervous. When Dan's eyes settled on him--Mel was by now a very pale, rather woeful looking figure in the late stages of his cancer--Mel became still more nervous. He thought perhaps the class was silent because they were waiting for this uninvited guest to leave. But Mel held his seat--when you are going to die, it can be rather freeing; you needn't be so polite.

At last the silence was broken. Dan Berrigan spoke directly to Mel with the simplest of questions: "What's the matter?"

Mel briefly considered various responses, including "It's none of your business." But the responses seemed both useless and truthless. So he said to the rather rude Jesuit, "I'm dying. I'm dying of cancer."

There wasn't a pause in Berrigan's response. Nor was there a sudden convulsion of sorrow or pity in his face.

"That must be very exciting."

Confrontation with death, with the awful power of death made present in a young life, normally brings shock and horror. The pious promise their prayer. Others swallow in silence. Most flee. Few can imagine thinking, much less announcing, "That must be very exciting."

For Mel this brief, impossible sentence fell into his life like a stroke of lightning, an instant of zen enlightenment, a transfiguration: "Yes! How true! It is the most extraordinary event of my life! I have never before faced death."

As it happened, Mel was not, in fact, so quick about getting to the cemetery. The cancer evaporated from his body nearly as fast as water boils out of a teakettle.

Mel continued with the Berrigan class and began others. He became a Quaker and worked full time in the anti-war movement after leaving the seminary. When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, he was one of the first to respond to its refugees, and one of the rare ones to reckon with the problem of postwar repression in Vietnam. Mel not only outlived the first death sentence but, until his death in 1979 in a fire, lived quite extraordinarily on behalf of other survivors.

I described this event as a parable. I see in Dan Berrigan's response the role of the ministering church in the world and the role of the peacemaker. I see in Mel with his terminal cancer and his hopelessness a vivid image of all of us in this world who have been consigned to a future nuclear holocaust, and those many dying already of its consequences in the disruption of attention to human life and its requirements.

Mel is ourselves with all our secret fears, the unconfessed dreads that imprison our lives and which cripple our response to suffering. Mel is us feeling sorry for ourselves that we belong to what might be the last human generation, the generation which harvests the work of so many generations of weapons designers. Mel is our self-pity.

The response of a faithful church, a faithful community, is to find a way of saying the good news and releasing us from captivity; a way of saying, "Isn't it exciting?"

Such a sentence is soaked with the resurrection--a profound confidence in the power of God and God's unshakeable commitment to us, both in our suffering and on both sides of death. The statement of good news is soaked with heaven, that same wisdom which once led Theresa of Avila to say, "All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus said, 'I am the way.' " It is a declaration that vividly communicates a sense of the presence of God, that hurls the mind into a wakefulness to that presence.

Perhaps we Christian peacemakers are too silent about these realities, too slow to express our complete dependence on the grace of God, the power of the resurrection. Do we fear--among our other fears--to seem too foolish, too pious, perhaps a little traditional, even old-fashioned? Such fears can be as awesome as those generated by the presence of nuclear weapons. Nearly 2,000 years have passed since Jesus spoke of good news to the people in Nazareth, and much longer since Isaiah spoke of the Spirit's anointing. Our end time is so much more rational and scientific. Talk of prayer and God and such things can seem an awful embarrassment, a public confession of irrelevancy.

But I wonder where else we can hope to find a way of overcoming those legion fears that have so long been leading humanity toward the situation of the last generation? How else to find the resources of hope when there is no longer a basis for optimism?

The "acceptable year" of which Jesus spoke that day in Nazareth was the Jubilee Year--the year in which rest and justice and forgiveness were at the very center of life for an entire people. As Jesus gave expression to this text from Isaiah in his own life, he was taking an ancient hope and giving it a new definition. Instead of Jubilee Year, a period of forgiveness and restoration of community every 49 years, he announced a way of life that was centered on forgiveness and reconciliation, with an end to fear and violence. This marked an end to blindness as well--the blindness through which we dehumanize others and perceive others as enemies, a prerequisite for war.

The proclamation of Jubilee, in that occupied country rapidly moving toward a disastrous war of liberation, is analogous to the exclamation, "That must be very exciting." In a situation of bad news, Jesus speaks of good news. In a situation of oppression, liberation. Of blindness, sight. Of captivity, freedom. He not only recites an ancient text, he says, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." The excitement that followed is not surprising; neither is the fact that Jesus narrowly escaped being murdered by a crowd angered by his statements following the Jubilee text.

The word excitement comes from the Latin word exitare: "to move rapidly away." Some in Jesus' audience in Nazareth were inclined to move Joseph's son rapidly away from the synagogue and toward death. Jesus, on the other hand, was inviting his listeners rapidly away from participation in or subjection to the bad news all around.

Jesus' word was an excitement to create community in a situation of radical breakup. It was an excitement to do justice in the midst of injustice. It was an excitement to see in a situation in which blindness might seem more comforting. It was an excitement to refuse weapons in a situation that was driving many toward greater reliance on weapons. It was an excitement to the activation of faith in a situation of despair. It was an excitement to forgiveness where forgiveness seemed not only impossible but horribly inappropriate.

The Jubilee, with its root in the Sabbath, has to do with the exciting adventure of living--with the belief that the Messiah is already with us. Thus we have the possibility of forgiveness, of seeing even in a hardened enemy a potential neighbor and friend, and in a war criminal an unhardened pacifist. In the grace of God, such transformation is possible. It has already happened. We have known bits of that transformation in our own lives. When sight is given the dimension of grace, we see ourselves not only in an unspeakably marvelous world and universe, but we see possibilities of transformation everywhere. Eyesight without grace, no matter how acute, is blind to the essentials, is trapped in the divisions and violence of the past.

The Jubilee message announced by Jesus of Nazareth, like Berrigan's pronouncement to Mel, revives a sense of wonder and astonishment. An essential quality of religious life and peacemaking is an ability to perceive the miracle of existence, the beauty of created things, the confession of God that is in all beauty. It is through this sense of wonder that we find ourselves drawn to become guardians of life and opponents of those forces which are contemptuous of life. It is this wonder which nourishes love and which helps us awaken in others a similar wonder. We can say with G.K. Chesterton, "I am astonished that people are not astonished."

The Jubilee announcement, like Berrigan's manner toward the pale stranger in his classroom, is blunt, and even rude. Perhaps there is a place for holy rudeness. It may be rude to speak of forgiveness and reconciliation in situations of death caused by cancer or of life under ruthless landlords and violent soldiers.

There has been steady motion toward a military apocalypse for many centuries, and its weight was felt painfully by the Jews of Nazareth who first heard Jesus' announcement of Jubilee. We live today in a situation of possible world-embracing catastrophe, which for many is inevitably a time of despair. It is a despair which often occurs very quietly. We can be its victims as easily as anyone. Against the weight of such nuclearized bad news, it becomes difficult to imagine good news.

A main task of religious life and peacemaking is to free ourselves from subjection to the huge fears that our situation can bring upon us, which can either paralyze life-supporting responses or produce a resistance which is so embittered that it only deepens human entrapment in violence. The experience of faith reveals the presence and power of God in such a way that a resistance to destruction that is in its nature reconciling becomes possible. We cannot simply refuse collaboration in destruction and offer resistance to it; we must become for others channels of hope. It is, after all, not we who hope, but God who hopes in us; and because it is God who has the hope, that hope is sure.

The hope that is sure is that, despite ourselves, despite our weapons, despite the arms race, despite all the injustice and division, God intends to save us, and has already done so. We can live and act with a confidence that is entirely absent for those imprisoned in dependence on weapons. Far from pitying ourselves, far from refusing to bring a new generation of children into the world, far from resigning the human species to extinction, we can embrace our times, live the Jubilee, and surprise the gloomy with the words, "Isn't it exciting?"

James H. Forest was a Sojourners correspondent and coordinator of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, based in Holland, when this article appeared.