John 12.1-8
In the ancient myth of Pandora a beautiful woman is sent to earth with a box full of gifts for a man called Epimetheus. Epimetheus was so delighted with Pandora that he married her and forgot all about the gifts.
This was a pity because his brother, Prometheus, had upset the gods and the box contained their revenge. On their instruction, Pandora opened the box and let the gifts out. But the gifts were all harmful things, designed by the gods to divide and upset people.
According to one version, when Pandora realised that the gifts were not meant to be a good thing, she quickly put the lid back on the box, trapping the last one inside. But in other versions she was too late and they all escaped.Either way, the last gift or curse left in the box, or the last to escape, was hope.
The ancients saw hope as a bad thing because it stops us from making the best of the way life is now. If we're constantly hoping for something better to turn up we won't confront the problems facing us while there's still a chance to deal with them using our existing resources.
So, for instance, we hope that global warming might turn out to be a mistaken hypothesis, or we hope for some brilliant technical solution to trap carbon underground again or reflect the sun's heat, or that natural fluctuation in the climate will offset the damage we've done. Or to give the example of Brexit, on one side people hope for wonderful new trade deals while on the other they hope for a second referendum. In all these cases, hoping for the best imaginable outcome becomes the enemy of the reasonable outcome or the workable compromise that we could have now.
A similar argument has been made about trusting in the democratic process to bring these things about. We keep hoping that the best ideas will eventually attract the most votes. But what if they never do? At what point does hope in the right outcome become a barrier to bringing about real change? When should we turn instead to righteous anger and find the determination to bring about the change we want in another way? This sort of radical doubt about the real value of hope has motivated the most recent climate change protests, the dire threats of revolution on the streets if Brexit is postponed or cancelled and the reluctance of Remainers to settle for anything less than another Referendum.
The Old Testament prophets won't settle for making the best of things. They believe that the future belongs to God and that one day he will come to dwell with his people. For them hope is certainly not a bad thing, it's essential, for without it we cannot look forward to God's coming.
In the Bible being hopeful is more than just thinking that the glass is half full rather than half empty. It isn't mere optimism, always looking on the bright side of life or trusting that things will simply get better and better. Instead, it's the belief that there will be a final stage of history where we find wholeness and completeness, and lasting peace, in God.
Christianity claims this hope, in God coming to be with us, has actually been realised in Jesus. This is a hope that grounded in God's revelation. But when hope is based on trust in God that means it's been replaced - at least to some extent - by faith, because we don't have to hope any more if we believe that the thing we were hoping for has already happened.
Christianity also puts certainty into hope where it hadn't belonged before. We talk blithely about the 'sure and certain hope' of resurrection whereas previously people could only really say that they hoped for something if there was an element of doubt about it. Even today, in normal usage, hoping for something isn't the same as expecting it to happen.
But there are three ways in which genuine hope still applies to Christians, even though God has already come in Jesus. First the world is not yet the way that God intends it to be, so while we may have faith that Jesus really is God with us, we also need to have hope that - when enough people choose to believe in his loving power, or when history ends - the world will change and become the way it's meant to be . As someone has pointed out, Christians don't lose this hope just because that decisive change hasn't come about yet. Instead, we go on hoping, because it could happen tomorrow, or the day after. Presumably that's why the Apostle Paul said that three things abide, faith hope and love.
The second way in which hope continues for Christians is a personal one, what John Wesley called 'the hope of Christian Perfection', the hope of being made perfect in love through the presence and power of Jesus' Spirit. St Augustine said that our spirits will always be restless until we find our true rest in Jesus.
And the third thing which Christianity emphasises, although here it's only expanding on what the Old Testament prophets had already said, is that genuine hope comes out of struggle, hardship and adversity. For Christians we can have hope in Jesus only because he died on the cross.
Unfortunately, while Christian hope might be a good thing, ordinary human hope can be foolish, destructive and irrational. It can lead us down blind alleys. It can fill us with false optimism. So Christian hope has never completely banished the older pessimistic view expressed in the story of Pandora. Millions of people hope to win the lottery, but even though the adverts encourage them to imagine who they'd share their winnings with, they’ll probably never win.
In the modern era hope based on God's revelation has been replaced by other kinds of hope - hope based on scientific evidence or reason. So we hope that global warming can be averted if we reduce the amount of carbon that we release into the atmosphere, and there are computer models to show, as precisely as possible, what we need to do.
The Christian philodopher Emmanuel Kant lived before the age of computing but he created his own model for hope. He said that, like people struggling to avert climate change, we all have to come together and harness our efforts to achieve the highest good that's possible. And for it to be rational for us to put our trust in this kind of optimistic plan, Kant said we need to believe there is a benign creator, someone who has ordered the universe so that there are rules to things like climate change which we can discover and use to put things right.
There is a school of thought which says that climate is so complex, and subject to so many variables, that nothing we can possibly do will stop it from changing for the worse. We have set in motion a runaway effect.
The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche said that, in such a situation, hope would be false; it would be a bad thing, like the rest of the contents of Pandora's box. False hope could only encourage us to struggle in vain. It would be better, he said, to give up and die! But Kant argued that, if we can see a rational way to achieve the highest good possible, such as limiting climate change to a few degrees above normal, we can still have a justified hope that it can be done.
Similarly, in the Church, we could despair about the future and some people do. They think the Church, in this country at least, will gradually wither away and disappear. But if we believe that church members could work together to achieve the highest good possible, the sort of outcome that a benign creator might want to see, then we should continue hoping for change and growth, and working to make it happen. Kant says that hope gives us the impetus we need to try to turn things around and the encouragement we need that we can rely on God's help.
In fairness to Nietzsche, it has to be said that he changed his mind as he got older and gave up his older gloomy view that hope was always likely to be false. Eventually he understood that hope can inspire us to keep on trying, to think outside the box, when otherwise we might be inclined to give up. Hope, the older Nietzsche said, is like a rainbow. We might never reach it, but the very act of trying to get to it can transform our situation. Hope, he now felt, far from being false is the thing which actually gives meaning to our lives.
Someone has said that a life without hope would be like living in exile, grey and drab. There has certainly never been a time when the right kind of hope was more needed. There are so many big problems in our world today, and in the life of the Church, that we could easily sink into despair.
Despair, it seems to me, is one of the genuine evils that was lurking in Pandora's box. So too is the kind of empty optimism that just hopes something will turn up to make everything alright in the end. But the kind of hope that is allied to prayer and positive action, the kind of hope that seeks to change things for the better, is a Christian virtue.
The author J R R Tolkien, the guy who wrote The Lord of the Rings, said that fairy tales have a lot to teach us about life because they always have a happy ending. They remind us, he thought, that however unlikely it might sometimes seem, it's always possible that our life - or the situation we find ourselves in - might have a better outcome than we expect. The Easter story isn't a fairy story but it carries the same message. The resurrection was an unlikely outcome to the story but it reminds us that with God a happy ending can never be ruled out.
Is John’s story about Martha and Mary just an alternative version to the one in Luke’s Gospel? The two accounts do share some elements in common.
In Luke’s version the place where the story unfolds is called Martha’s home, not the home of Lazarus. Perhaps that just reflects convention. John feels that a home must belong to the man of the house whereas for Luke it belongs to Martha because she is the one in charge.
In both stories Martha serves the food and Mary sits at Jesus’ feet - two different and contrasting ways of being attentive to him, reflecting no doubt the division that persists to this day between people who do and people who contemplate. Luke’s version doesn’t include the anointing of Jesus’ feet, although he implies that Mary washed them. He has a different anointing story, shared with Matthew and Mark and set in the house of Simon the Pharisee, and he doesn’t want to confuse or conflate the two. Whereas Matthew and Mark agree with John that the story unfolded in the village of Bethany, Luke doesn’t say where it happened. So John either borrows details from that different anointing story and projects them onto Mary, or gives us an account of a different anointing in the same village, perhaps a copycat one.
For our purposes the key thing is the argument about the costly perfume. If, like Judas, we are cup half-empty people it has been wasted in a hopeless, empty and extravagant gesture that will quickly be forgotten and which has no deeper significance than Mary’s foolish whim. If, like Jesus, we are cup brimming over people, buoyed up by hope and optimism, and perhaps also by faith, then it’s a preparation for - perhaps even a foretaste of - his burial and - by implication - his resurrection. Mark and Matthew add one final note of hope in their versions, where Jesus says, ‘Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’ In other words, even here - at least a week and perhaps much more before his death - Jesus is already expecting a happy ending.
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