Hope
in difficult times
Pandora’s Paradox
In Hesiod's Works and Days we read these lines:
ὀνόμηνε δὲ τήνδε γυναῖκα
Πανδώρην, ὅτι πάντες Ὀλύμπια δώματʼ ἔχοντες
δῶρον ἐδώρησαν, πῆμʼ ἀνδράσιν ἀλφηστῇσιν I.80-82And [Zeus] called this woman 'Pandora', because all the Olympus' dwelling [gods] gave a gift, a calamity to bread-eating men.
Thus begins the account that leads to the well-known but rarely-read trope of Pandora's box; Pandora is a human woman made by Hephaestos, sent to Epimetheus (Prometheus' lesser-known brother), who opens a jar:
ἀλλὰ γυνὴ χείρεσσι πίθου μέγα πῶμʼ ἀφελοῦσα
ἐσκέδασʼ· ἀνθρώποισι δʼ ἐμήσατο κήδεα λυγρά.
μούνη δʼ αὐτόθι Ἐλπὶς ἐν ἀρρήκτοισι δόμοισιν
ἔνδον ἔμιμνε πίθου ὑπὸ χείλεσιν, οὐδὲ θύραζε
ἐξέπτη I.94-98but the woman removed the large jar lid with her hands
and scattered [all these ills]; Hope alone remained there in the unbreakable home
within, under the lips of the jar, and did not fly out through the opening.
Hope: why is it left in Pandora's jar? Is it to keep it for humanity, or to keep it from humanity? Is hope a comfort or a delusion, a necessity or a deception. What are we to do with hope, and how could we live without it? These are questions that pertain to our everyday lives, and our global political ones. To begin with Pandora is to recognise that hope occupies an ambiguous place for us: a necessity, painful to us, tormenting us at the same time it saves us from despair.
What is hope?
Standard philosophical accounts of hope take it to contain two primary ingredients:
i) the object of hope is desired by the subject
ii) it object of hope is neither certain nor only theoretically possible.
That is, simply, we hope for things that we think are good, and those things are possible (if not necessarily probable). If I 'hope for rain tomorrow', it indicates an attitude that I think rain tomorrow would be good (at least for me!) and that rain happening tomorrow is a possible event. If rain were impossible, my hope would be futile. If it were certain, I wouldn't hope but have confidence. If rain is desired but impossible, then I have despair - a hope contrary to fact.
Why all this hope talk? 20th January was MLK day. I was reminded, by a number of articles I read, of some of MLK's writings and speeches, and particularly by Esau McCaulley's quotations from MLK's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech: "I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history", and McCaulley's comment:
Speaking about the problems is not the hard part. Much more difficult is to find the strength to believe there is a hope beyond our jeremiads. Despair has never liberated anybody.
It moved me enough to look up and listen to his speech in full. Not a bad use of your time either.
All hope involves a degree of pain. Because hope exists in the tension between the undesired and the desired. We hope for better things: for healing on the other side of disease, for peace on the other side of violence, for home on the other side of exile, for reconciliation on the other side of estrangement. To abandon hope, to despair, literally to dis-hope in the hoped for thing, is to allow one's hopes to be crushed for one final time, never to rise again. To accept that a disease will never be healed, violence will never end, to perish in exile, to be permanently estranged. In despair one's mental and emotional probability calculus moves "hoped for" to zero. And, while it is sometimes necessary to give up hope precisely because there is no possibility, to give up all hopes is to accept a horizon without a glimmer of dawn, and only endless darkness stretching before us. Humans, I believe, cannot live in such a state of despair. When all hopes are gone, life itself is unliveable. Without hope, we die.
The objects of hope
The shape of hope can, I believe, be configured by considering that it takes two objects, not one. That is, we hope "for X", and we put our hope "in Y", as an act of trust in Y's ability and willingness to bring about X. E.g. voters puts their hope in a candidate to deliver an election promise. When hope doesn't have an explicit trust-object, then hope is configured towards an abstract 'working out of the universe'. E.g. "I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow" isn't an act of trust that God will or will not make it rain, because it requires nothing of me in terms of self-entrustment; it's an expression of wish that the configuration of the universe will turn out not to involve rainfall, to my convenience.
"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope." - MLK, somewhere somewhen.1
Providence, goodness, and suffering
In what can we hope, and what can we hope for? Those questions are perhaps more urgent now than ever before. I found myself this past week listening, by chance, to a Tim Keller sermon from 1997, "A Christian's Happiness" on Romans 8:28-30 which says some of the things he often says, but I think he crystallised one of his points about suffering in a way that I don't think is as clear and forceful as elsewhere.
Firstly, "All the same things that happen to everybody else will happen to people who love God", referring to all the terrible things that can happen to people in life. I think that's an incredibly sobering reminder. There is zero guarantee of better life outcomes for believers. In no way should I think that because I love Jesus, I will be protected from bad things in my personal life or in my period of history. Hunger, disease, debilitating injury, poverty, violence, sexual assault, family breakdown, abandonment, accidental deaths of loved ones, imprisonment, torture. All these things can happen to me; and have and do happen to Christians.
To be disabused of the notion that "this can't possibly happen; God can't possibly let it" is not comforting, except that it removes a false comfort and offers a way of understanding providence and evil that is necessary. Could we see the most powerful nation in the world run by fascists and untold human suffering unleashed? Yes. Should I expect to live a life of ease and prosperity where I enjoy the good things of life from cradle to grave? No, that seems unlikely, and is never a promise that God makes.
Secondly, and this was equally important, Keller frames the "God works all things together for good" not in terms of 'circumstances will get better', but to make us more like Jesus Christ in his sufferings. I don't think he quite puts this point, like this, anywhere else. It is conformity to the suffering servant in his sufferings that is the working together for good that all things does. Does God's providence bring other, circumstantial goods, out of sufferings? Sure, but not always, and not always in ways we'll see or recognise or accept.
I raise this because it brings us back to the topic of hope. All the "we must have hope" discourse runs the risk of being naively optimistic. Why should we have hope? What are we to hope in? These questions remain unanswered, or collapse into the saccharine wishful thinking of optimists. I am not an optimist about global politics or human nature.
Christian hope is first and fundamentally messianic and eschatological.
It is eschatological in the sense that the time-frame for the realisation of all our hopes, our greatest hopes, is the end-times, the return of Christ and the setting right of all wrongs, the undoing of all evil, the redemption and restoration of all creation. It's not decades, or centuries, or millennia; it's however long the world lasts until Jesus returns. Every fulfilment of hope before that time is a merciful foretaste; every evil and calamity before then is framed by not the moral arc of the universe, but the redemptive arc of a God who promises justice and mercy.
It is messianic in the sense that this hope is in the saviour figure, Jesus of Nazareth, who was and is God Incarnate, come 2000 years ago to die on a cross, and will-come-again to judge the living and the dead. Precisely because this object of hope is that messiah, all other hopes are tempered and temporal. We should never expect people (or things) to deliver what only Jesus can. We will continually be disappointed with other human beings. Even more so if we turn them into saviour figures.
The conclusion of the matter
When we draw all these threads together, what are we to make of the tapestry?
Firstly, a sobering sense that the worst can happen, and that God being in control of the universe is not a safeguard against that. We live in the world where the Holocaust happened, and all theology afterwards has to wrestle with that. From the smallest thing in our personal lives, to the sheer and utter evil of genocide of millions of people, there is no comfort in the thought "it can't happen" or "God wouldn't let X happen to me". We should never be surprised as the depths of human depravity.
Secondly, a hope that is transcendent. I do not think there is much room for naïve optimism or for hope for hope's sake or for a wishy-washy hope in humanity's better qualities. All such hopes meet with bitter despair against the reality of evil and suffering in the world. I do not think "things will just get better". They might, they might not. But a hope that is grounded in trust of a crucified messiah who promises to return to set all things right is a hope that cannot flounder on the vicissitudes of the course of history.
Thirdly, a conviction that all the world's evils and sufferings are transfigured in the cross, to serve the good. Not to reduce this to "well, this turned out for better circumstances later on", but to see that there is divine purpose for all suffering which cannot be answered in simple terms of "I see how this turned out better", but in cosmic theological terms of recapitulating all things into Christ the head.
Fourthly, a resolve to pursue virtue at all costs. To fight against evil in all its forms, by pursuing a cruciform life of love. I think this is part of the enduring and necessary legacy of MLK. It is all too easy to conclude that the answer to Nazis in 2025 is to kill them, but I do not believe that is the way of Christ. To love our enemies, forgive those who hurt us, and seek the redemption of our foes, is to conquer evil by good, at the price of suffering. This is how not 'we', but 'good' wins over evil.
Fifthly, then, to never lose hope nor resolve because, again, all the evils of this world from the global to the highly individual, cannot assail a hope that is placed in a good that cannot itself be lost. That is the transformative power of faith in Christ - to have Christ is to have all that is both good and necessary, and all other things can be counted as loss, in light of having him.
Honestly, I hesitated to include this quotation. Always be dubious of quotations of famous figures you can't reference. The many uses of this quote lack much referencing, but seem to source it from Coretta Scott King's "Martin Luther King: In my own words" from 2002, a book I can't access to check; but I wonder if it is a fragment.