Hope

Reading these passages

Nine verses on this page are for hope. One is against it, and it is the one worth reading first.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.

Proverbs is not offering encouragement here. It is describing an injury. Hope, held long enough without resolution, makes a person ill — and the Hebrew for sick is the ordinary word for illness, not a figure of speech for disappointment. The book that elsewhere recommends patience is willing to say plainly that waiting has a cost and that the cost is paid in the body.

Having that verse on the page changes the others. Everything else here recommends hope; this one has counted what it charges. Any reading of the page that leaves it out is reading a brochure.

The verse on the fridge magnet

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.

Jeremiah 29:11 is quoted at graduations and printed on cards for people starting something. It was written to people finishing something — a deportation. The letter is addressed to exiles already in Babylon, and the verse immediately before it supplies the timetable: after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you.

Seventy years. Most of the original recipients would not live to see it. The promise is real and it is not for them; it is for their grandchildren. And the instruction Jeremiah gives them in the same letter is to build houses, plant gardens and seek the welfare of the city that had conquered them — in other words, to settle, because this is not ending soon.

Read in place, the verse is considerably stronger than the version on the fridge magnet, and considerably less comfortable. It does not promise that the difficulty is temporary in any sense the reader would recognise. It promises that there is an intention behind it and an end to it, and it puts that end beyond the horizon of the person being addressed.

An anchor, not a wish

English has moved hope a long way from what these passages mean by it. To hope now is to want something whose arrival is uncertain — the word carries doubt as part of its meaning. The New Testament word does not. Elpis is expectation directed at something regarded as settled, and the difference is not one of confidence level. It is a difference of kind.

Which is why the image Hebrews reaches for is nautical: Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast, and which entereth into that within the veil.

An anchor is not an aspiration. It is a physical object attached to something that does not move, and its whole function depends on the far end being fixed. Notice where the writer says this one is attached — not to the future or to a promise in the abstract, but within the veil, the inner sanctuary of the temple. The anchor goes upward and inward rather than down.

Paul says the same thing without the picture: And hope maketh not ashamed. The verb means to be put to shame, to be disappointed in a way that exposes you as having been foolish to expect anything. That is the specific risk of hoping, and Paul says it does not materialise here — not because the outcome is likely, but because of who is behind it.

Where it comes from

Romans traces the supply chain, and the order is not the one anybody would choose: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.

Hope arrives last, and the first link is trouble. There is no shortcut in the sequence and no version of it that begins somewhere pleasant. The middle term, experience, translates dokime — the word for what is left after something has been tested, the proven quality of a metal that has been through fire. Hope in this account is not a disposition some people have. It is a residue.

Lamentations arrives at the same place by a harder road. The book is five chapters of grief over a destroyed city, and in the middle of the third the writer stops and deliberately changes the subject: This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. The hope does not appear on its own. It is produced by an act of recollection, performed on purpose, in the middle of a book that never stops grieving.

What he recalls is this: It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning. Every morning is a small claim, not a large one. He is not saying the city will be rebuilt. He is saying the supply has not run out yet, today, which is the least that could be said and apparently enough.

A definition in legal language

The most quoted definition on this page is not written in religious vocabulary at all: Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Both nouns come from the world of documents. Substance translates hypostasis, which in the papyri of the period is a regular term for a title deed — the paper establishing that a property is yours before you have taken possession of it. And evidence translates elenchos, a courtroom word: the proof that settles a case.

So the sentence is not saying that faith is a strong feeling about things you cannot verify. It is saying that faith functions as documentation. The deed is not the house, and nobody would confuse the two, but a deed is not a wish either — it is the instrument by which a claim is held while the thing itself is elsewhere.

That reading also explains why the chapter following it is a list of people rather than an argument. Hebrews 11 goes on to name a long sequence of figures who died without receiving what they were promised, and says so explicitly about them. If faith were confidence that the thing will arrive shortly, the chapter would be a catalogue of disappointments.

Talking to yourself

Psalm 42 does something no other verse on this page does: it argues. Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.

The psalmist is not addressing God, and he is not addressing a congregation. He is interrogating himself, in the second person, and then issuing himself an instruction. Hope thou in God is a command given by a man to his own soul, which assumes hope is at least partly something one can be told to do.

He does not claim to feel it. The tense he reaches for is future — I shall yet praise him — and the same refrain returns twice more in the psalm, unchanged, which means the argument did not work the first time. That repetition is the most honest thing on the page. The psalm preserves an unfinished attempt rather than tidying it into a resolution.

Paul turns it into a three-part instruction that reads like a triage list: Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer. The three are given together and in that order, and the middle one concedes what the first does not — that the tribulation is ongoing while the rejoicing is happening. Neither cancels the other.

And the benediction is careful about the source: Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost. Hope is not something Paul asks them to produce. He asks that they be filled with it, which puts it in the same category as the joy and the peace beside it — received rather than achieved, and, in the arithmetic of this page, the thing that arrives at the end of a long and unpleasant sequence starting with trouble.