II Corinthians 4:13-5:1 Devotion

Please read the passage first.
Among the many things I appreciate about the apostle Paul is his elucidation of what Christian tradition came to call the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. Although he did this most famously in I Corinthians 13, it recurs in (I think) all of his letters.

Today, we often think of positive or negative thinking, or the thinking of the optimist or pessimist. I think Vaclav Havel is quite helpful when he separates optimism from hope.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. (Disturbing the Peace (1986), Chapter 5)

Many people would view themselves as pessimistic and as cynics. Yet, they get up each morning, and get on with their lives. I wonder if underneath the overt negativity is not some buried optimism that this day might contain a surprise. In fact, some research suggests that evolution has hardwired human beings for hope. Without going into the research, here is a comment from one of the researchers, Tali Sharot,

"Without optimism, our ancestors might never have ventured far from their tribes and we might all be cave dwellers, still huddled together and dreaming of light and heat." ("The optimism bias." TIME, June 6, 2011, 38-46)

We may have some hard wiring, so to speak, that helps us take risks and imagine a better future.

Yet, the hope we find in the New Testament has a different basis, even if it may meet a quite human need.

The hope of which Paul could write and by which he lived had its basis in what he believed God had done and said in Jesus, whom God raised from the dead. Because of that, the afflictions he described in II Corinthians 4:7-12 became in verse 17 his slight momentary affliction gained a different perspective. In fact, they prepare for him an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. He looks to what he cannot see, for what he can see is temporary, but what he cannot see is eternal. His hope extends to facing death, for the earthly tend we live in may die, but, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

As C. S. Lewis perceptively observed,

"The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely, from this point of view, the promise of glory, in the sense described, becomes highly relevant to our deep desire. For glory means good rapport with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgment, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last ... [and reveal] ... a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain."[1]

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[1] ("The Weight of Glory," in C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975; First Touchstone Edition, 1996], 34-36.)