Metropolitan Georges Khodr on Hope

August 2015- Notes on Arab Orthodoxy

God does not force Himself on you. He wants you to desire salvation. The salvation that you hope for is perfect in God, He gives it to you perfect and you accept it. If you accept it, this is faith. Faith is defined as you knowing that God is a shelter for you, that He is your place of safety in that you have no existence outside of Him. This is the mystery, that you subsist in God, that He is the space in which you exist. He is only the space in which you exist– you are not Him even though you are within Him. All this can only be understood in love. Your being in God also means that you are moving toward Him, because all of our relationship to Him is motion. People of love understand these words because they have been liberated from spacial limitation.

Our existence in God is our motion movement towards Him and movement towards Him is also from Him. This movement is the hope that the Lord places within us, if He so wills. We hope. That is, we are going towards what we hope, because God is coming. He has not only come and his arrival has ended. He is constantly coming. You see Him in every glimpse of Him. You see Him anew. God remains fixed in the sense that He is true to Himself. That is, He never reduces what He gives you, since He never gives you less than Himself. He is the same “yesterday, today and forever”. If you hope, you know that what you hope for is in your possession and is with you.

You hope for God. That is, you seek what comes from Him every day because you know that He is faithful to Himself and that He gives you what is in His possession– that is, everything. Hope is for what will come, but in the God who is coming it has come. That is, you ask for continued divine giving. If faith is precisely resting fixed in God, then hope is what you await of the Lord’s constant gifts. The true meaning of your hoping is that you are in motion towards what has come to you because what the Lord gives you has been, is and shall be. We are truly with God, not toward what is coming, but toward that which does not change. We are constantly with God.

Hope is not you waiting for a tomorrow that is better than what came to you yesterday. Hope is true faith in the persistence of divine giving and that that which He gives is the same as what He gave yesterday. You hope because you will have tomorrow what you had yesterday because your Lord is the same and He is one in giving.

When we talk about hope, we are not talking about something we have not known, since God is one with Himself. We want the Lord to be Himself with us, and not to add anything to this. Truly and profoundly, then, hope and faith are one. It is nothing but faith, in the sense that you only hope for what you believe in. That is, you only hope for what exists.

The opposite of hope is acquiescence to that which is mutable. You know that God has not only come, but He is forever coming and He shall come as Himself. That is, in love. You do not believe that tomorrow is better than yesterday. You believe that the divine Always accompanies you and causes you to be in agreement with Him and accompany Him. Hope is trust that God is in agreement with Himself because time does not change Him and he accompanies you over your changes.

Hope is not the conviction that tomorrow and the changes that it will bring is better than today. Rather, it means that God in His love is one with Himself today and tomorrow. From this perspective, hope is nothing other than faith. Because He is God, He give you today what He gave you yesterday. You believe one thing, that God is faithful to Himself. From this angle, it is possible to say that hope is the same as faith.

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