Hoping All Things

Today in my discernment class, after reading Ephesians 3:16-19 and a passage by Henri Nouwen about how God calls each of us "Beloved," we read 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.  Usually whenever I have read that third passage, I have thought about love between human beings, whether it be romantic or selfless love.  But hearing it today in the context of God's love for us, for me, portrayed a fresh perspective of God to me.

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends." (NRSV)

How I heard it was something like the following:  God is patient; God is kind; God is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  God does not insist on God's own way; God is not irritable or resentful; does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.  God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Here I want to explore the claim that God hopes all things.  I have not routinely pictured God as someone who hopes for things at all.  If God knows all things, then what room would there be for hope?  If I already know that Frodo and Sam will destroy the Ring of Power at the end of the story, for example, then when I am reading through The Lord of the Rings, can I truly say I hope they will succeed in the end?  I may feel something like hope, and that is to the credit of the writing abilities of J.R.R. Tolkien, but that seems to me an artificial hope compared to hoping for something which may not actually end up as I hope.

Maybe hope is one gift of being a member of a species that cannot see the future; if we knew what was to come, and how it was to come, then for what would we hope?  If I knew without a doubt that in the end, God would resurrect us from the dead, then I may eagerly await it, and I may even hope that it will come soon, but I will not hope for it.

Theologian Karl Rahner writes about a human hope for the salvation of humanity in the end:

"An orthodox theologian. . . is forbidden to teach that everybody will be saved.  But we are allowed to hope that all will be saved.  If I hope to be saved, it is necessary to hope that for all men as well.  If you have reason to love another, you can hope that all will be saved."1

If we love one another and our enemies, as Christians are commanded to do, then we will hope that the other and our enemies will be redeemed, even if we believe that the way to salvation is narrow.  Hope, then, indicates love.  What do I hope for?  For whom do I hope?  What do I hope for this person or that?  By asking what we hope for, we are asking who we love and what we value.  To say God hopes all things, then, is also to say that God hopes all things for us, which is yet another expression of God's deep and wide love for us.  Could it be that even more deeply than we are called to do, God hopes that all will be saved? 

We certainly do not know how the end will turn out, but to say that God hopes all things suggests that even God does not know how all things will end.    God hopes all things, which means that not all things are guaranteed.  Thus, in hoping all things, God is taking the greatest risk of all.  God shares in our vulnerability.

At the same time, God hopes all things, which means there is hope for us all.


1 Tilley, Terrence.  Story Theology.  (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1985),  66.