Hope is such an irrepressible quality. People in prison, people in refugee camps and even in great poverty and deprivation still manage to hope. For 12 years now most Zimbabweans have seen their livelihoods diminish and almost disappear. There is greater poverty and insecurity in this country than there has ever been. And yet you have only to watch people as they move around town to sense the lightness in their step and the brightness in their attitude. There is a lot of hope – and humour – around. Yet it is hard to know why this is. There is little evidence that things are going to get better.
But there is another picture that flashed across our screens last week; of communities in Burma who have been driven out of their homes by others they lived alongside for years. Some spark, some distrust, sprung up between them. Differences – they are of different tribes and different religions – which had never mattered before suddenly became important and one group felt threatened by the other. The result was the pictures we saw on our screens; people crowded together in a makeshift camp on an overcrowded island. Did they have hope on their faces? There was little sign of it.
Some of the bible readings put before us at this time, when the year is drawing to a close, speak of the last days. The Book of Daniel (Ch. 12) speaks of hope at the time when the Greek king was trying to force the Jews to abandon their ancient faith. His vision of Michael, ‘the great prince’, speaks not only to his contemporaries but to people of all time. Similarly, the words of Jesus, as given by Mark (Ch. 13), as he sits with his disciples on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem, are filled with hope for the future. He is well aware of the battle he is about to engage in, and that people of every age engage in, but it does not diminish that sense of a victory about to be won.