Hope Does Not Disappoint

I didn’t preach this weekend, but in Homiletics class last year I did write a homily for this weekend’s readings.

• Exodus 17: 3-7
• Romans 5: 1-2, 5-8
• John 4: 5-42

Do we think of Lent as a time of hope?

Saint Paul in his letter to the Romans today speaks of Hope, as something that does not disappoint. And it stuck out to me as a theme we might more commonly associate with Advent – Advent, when a Child is born to us, when a Savior is brought into the World. It’s all very hopeful.

Lent, by contrast, begins with ashes on our foreheads and the reminder that we are dust, and unto dust we shall return. We fast; we give up meat; we give up chocolate, coffee, social media; we pray the Stations of the Cross; right up to Good Friday and our celebration of suffering and death. Lent can seem very depressing.

The People of Israel in our reading from Exodus today seem like a people stuck in a perpetual Lent, a people without Hope. They’re tired, they’re thirsty, they’re in the desert with no water. They complain to Moses, and Moses himself seems to be a man without hope as he turns and makes his own complaint to God.

They have their hope of the Promised Land, but that’s a long way off and at the moment it just doesn’t feel like they’ll ever make it.

When St. Paul tells us that “hope does not disappoint,” it might feel like an empty platitude. I’m sure we can all think of times in our own lives when our hopes have been disappointed. A job that didn’t work out; a relationship broken apart; a life ended too soon. Paul himself knew this sting of frustrated hopes. He was not naïve. So what exactly does he mean when he speaks of this hope that does not disappoint?

In the Gospel we get the story of Jesus’s encounter with a Samaritan woman. We will learn that this woman has been married five times – that’s five hopes disappointed. And the fact that she comes to the well alone, in the middle of the day, indicates that she is an outcast, not welcomed within her community.

There is a theme we see from the Hebrew Scriptures, in Genesis and Exodus, where several of the ancient patriarchs found wives through encounters at a well. This woman would have been familiar with these stories and we might speculate that she could have had some hopes for this encounter. Maybe sixth time is the charm? (It turns out it is, but not in the way she might expect!)

The encounter plays out as a series of hopes, beginning at the most basic level.

It’s a common theme in John’s Gospel, that Jesus speaks metaphorically about deep spiritual issues and those around him understand it on the most basic, literal level. So when he promises “living water,” she latches on to the hope of never being thirsty or having to come back to the well ever again.

As their conversation progresses she comes to recognize Jesus as a prophet. Her hopes then shift from a basic need to a religious one. She hopes for answers to the contentious issues creating division between the Jews and the Samaritans. She wants to know, “who’s right, and who’s wrong?”

Jesus doesn’t give her the answer she wants, but challenges her to reframe the question. The real issue is not where we worship God, but how. What God wants is something beyond the petty religious bickering that divides Jews and Samaritans.

This leads her, then, to the final hope – a hope shared by the Jews and her own people: the hope of the Messiah, the Christ. And in this, her hope does not disappoint. And she runs to tell everyone about it.

Returning to what Saint Paul said: “Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” That living water Jesus promised, now poured out into her heart, to become in her a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

We are told that “many of the Samaritans of that town began to believe in Christ because of the testimony of the woman” – this woman who hours ago was afraid to show her face in public. Her life has been completely changed, in ways beyond anything she could have hoped for.

Like the people of Israel, travelling through the desert, whose hopes are focused on their immediate basic needs, even as God leads them ever toward the greater hope of a promised Land.

This is the hope of Lent. We recall that, at our lowest point, in our worst struggles, we look beyond Good Friday to the hope of the Resurrection. And in this, God’s hope will not disappoint.