2025 is a Jubilee year, a tradition rooted in ancient Judaism and first proclaimed in the Church by Pope Boniface VII in 1300. For ancient Israel, the Jubilee was required by Mosaic Law as specified in Leviticus 25 and was to occur every 50 years. It included the forgiveness of debts, the return of agricultural land to its original owners — with that land remaining fallow in the Jubilee year — and the setting free of slaves. These mandates reflect the emphasis on rest, freedom, and the gifts of the land and its fruits that originate with creation and the Sabbath day.
In turn, the Jubilee represents the thanksgiving, praise and worship of God as creator and the acknowledgment of God’s justice, forgiveness and loving care of his people. This 50-year ritual thus signified a profound restoration, both interior and exterior, that entailed the hope and consolation that love of God and neighbor brings. Any observance of the Jewish Jubilee ended when the Jews and their land were conquered by a succession of foreign rulers.
The fulfillment of the Jewish Jubilee and the eventual celebration of a Christian Jubilee year are both signified by Jesus at the outset of his ministry, in Luke 4:18-19, when he quotes from the messianic prophecy of Isaiah 61:1-2:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Jesus tells those listening to him that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21). We may understand this fulfillment in terms of the two advents of Jesus Christ: First, with the Incarnation, Jesus fulfills the Jubilee by the rest and freedom accomplished through his preaching, miracles, the forgiveness of sins, and his redemptive death and resurrection. Second, with the Parousia, or Second Coming, he promises the eternal rest and union with God that we await. As the Letter to the Hebrews declares, “So then, a sabbath rest still remains for the people of God; for those who enter God’s rest also cease from their labors as God did from his. Let us therefore make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one may fall through such disobedience as theirs” (4:9-11).
A waiting that necessitates hope
This waiting thus necessitates hope and preparation through a holy life. Accordingly, Pope Boniface proclaimed the first Jubilee Year in 1300 as a way to promote a life of faith and holiness through a year focused on prayer, pilgrimage and the forgiveness of sins. Over the centuries, the Church came to celebrate a Jubilee year every 25 years. In 1994, in anticipation of the Great Jubilee of 2000, Pope St. John Paul II reminded Catholics that the word jubilee means joy and that “the Jubilee celebration should confirm the Christians of today in their faith in God who has revealed himself in Christ, sustain their hope which reaches out in expectation of eternal life, and rekindle their charity in active service to their brothers and sisters” (Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 31).
Here we see Pope St. John Paul II define the Jubilee with a distinct focus on the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, which, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains, are infused in our soul by God and direct us to God and supernatural happiness (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 62). Regarding the particular virtue of hope, Thomas further explains that hope has as its object the future good of eternal union with God, which is difficult but not impossible to obtain (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 40).
Therefore, hope is a gift from God, as an infused theological virtue, and hope requires assistance from God, as we need grace to obtain that good of eternal happiness. St. Paul conveys both the divine gift of the three theological virtues and our active receptivity in his address to the Thessalonians: “remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thes 1:3). With this understanding of the nature of hope and hope with respect to the Jubilee year, let us turn to the New Testament to see what we may learn about hope from the words of Sacred Scripture.
Hope in the Gospels
The Greek word for the noun “hope,” ἐλπίς (transliterated into English as elpis), occurs in the New Testament 53 times but, surprisingly, not once in any of the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The verb for “to hope,” ἐλπίζω (elpizō), fares a bit better, since it occurs five times in the Gospels. These two Greek terms connote the sense of awaiting, anticipating and expecting, and, regardless of terminology, the theme of expectation is certainly a strong one in the Gospels. Of course, expectation or hope was already inherent to Jewish messianism. The writings of the prophets make clear that ancient Israel was waiting for the joyful day when the Messiah would come, as Isaiah 25:9 prophesies: “It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.”
We see a heightened sense of this messianic expectation, for example, in the Gospel of Luke, when the evangelist describes the righteous Simeon, who awaits the consolation of Israel (2:25), the prophetess Anna, who speaks of God to those people awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem (2:38), and Joseph of Arimathea, who was awaiting the kingdom of God (23:51). Once these messianic expectations are fulfilled by Jesus, he reveals that the true object of our hope is eternal life with God. As St. Thomas comments in his discussion of the fittingness of the Resurrection, it is partly “for the raising of our hope, since through seeing Christ, who is our head, rise again, we hope that we likewise shall rise again” (Summa Theologiae III, q. 53, Art. 3).
Following Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection, then, the first Christians begin to speak of the virtue of hope more directly. It makes sense that it is the letter writers of the New Testament, Sts. Paul, Peter and John, who teach us about the nature of our hope (using the word ἐλπίς 45 times), since they exhort Christians to live each day according to the virtue of hope, along with those of faith and charity.
A powerful exhortation on hope
To consider these apostolic teachings on hope more closely, we may take the example of St. Paul’s powerful Letter to the Ephesians. Paul wrote to the Ephesian Christians most likely in the mid-50s, which is about 10 years before his martyrdom. Rather than responding to particular questions or a crisis situation, as he often does in his letters, Paul offers a remarkable meditation and exhortation to the Christian life that explains what it means to be chosen by God and to be holy with the help of God’s grace.
Paul speaks eloquently on such topics as the divine plan of redemption, God’s love for us, the Trinity, forgiveness, the body of Christ, marriage and the household of God. Strikingly, Paul writes from prison and asks for their prayers “so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak” (6:19-20). There is a beautiful poignancy that Paul writes from captivity yet prays to continue proclaiming the Gospel, reminding us that the Gospel has hope at its center.
Paul mentions hope three times in his letter and primarily in relation to the Ephesians’ call from God to convert from paganism to Christianity, thereby identifying hope as absolutely essential to Christianity. Following a discussion of God’s great love for us and the gift of salvation, Paul asks the Ephesians to remember that they were previously “without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (2:12). In contrast to the grace-filled Christian life, Paul’s description of their former life is grim and bleak.
Writing in the late fourth century, St. Jerome comments on the pagan background of the Ephesians: “Now the fact that he says, ‘Having no hope, and without God in the world,’ does not mean that the Ephesians did not have and worship many gods before they believed in Christ, but that the person who is without the true God has no God. And it is significant that he adds, ‘without God in the world’. They had God, inasmuch as God knew beforehand those whom he would have, and they were not without God in God’s foreknowledge but in the world they were without God.” Therefore, to have hope means that one accepts the true God alone and amazingly undergoes a change by the grace of God from being separated and alienated strangers to “citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19).
Earlier in his letter, St. Paul conveys his prayer of thanksgiving for the Ephesians: “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you” (1:17-18). We may note Paul’s repeated emphasis on divinely given knowledge in relation to the hope of the Christian call. In his commentary on Ephesians, St. Thomas Aquinas discusses hope and the gift of understanding, and he interprets Paul’s words in the context of three other passages from the New Testament letters so that we may better grasp the depth of their meaning:
‘An anchor of the soul’
Three aspects pertain to the gift of understanding, one of which has reference to the present life, and two to the future. Hope, which is necessary for salvation, belongs to the present condition: “for we are saved by hope” (Rom. 8:24). Concerning this he says that you may know what, that is, how great the hope is of his calling, meaning the virtue of hope and what an immense reality it is concerned with.
This (hope) is of the utmost importance because it concerns the greatest realities: “He hath regenerated us unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Pet. 1:3). It is also the strongest of the virtues: “we may have the strongest comfort, we who have fled for refuge to hold fast the hope set before us. Which we have as an anchor of the soul, sure and firm, and which entereth in even within the veil” (Heb. 6:18-19).
Through his reading of Paul’s prayer, Thomas highlights how hope is directed toward, as Paul says, how God “made us alive together with Christ” (2:5).
Finally, Paul’s third direct reference to hope is part of a profound exhortation to the Ephesians to lead their lives in a manner worthy of their call to be members of the body of Christ, expressed as a sevenfold unity: “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (4:4-6). We see here that our membership in the body of Christ is rooted in the Trinity and entails the sacraments. Furthermore, Paul also specifies our unity in the call to the one hope so that we acknowledge our common goal of the hope of eternal salvation.
The Trinity, source of hope
St. Jerome replies to a question that Paul’s words raise in light of John’s Gospel, namely how we understand one hope when Jesus says there are many rooms in his Father’s house: “It is asked how there is ‘one hope of the calling’ when there are diverse dwellings with the Father (John 14:2). We reply to this that the ‘one hope of the calling’ is the kingdom of heaven understood as if it were one house of God the Father in which house are various dwellings.” Jerome concludes by further connecting the one hope to the unity that Jesus affirms in the High Priestly Prayer in John’s Gospel, the unity between Jesus the Son and God the Father, “that they may be one, as we are one” (Jn 17:22). Our hope to share in the life of the Trinity is the greatest hope indeed.
The teaching of St. Paul in the Letter to the Ephesians helps to clarify our Christian understanding of hope and our call to the eternal rest of salvation. In the Jubilee year of 2025, we have the opportunity to deepen our faith in light of this teaching. At the end of his First Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul uses a succinct metaphor that we would be wise to heed today. Since Jesus died that we might live with him, Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to live each day according to the theological virtues, here aptly expressed as the armor of God: “put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation” (1 Thes 5:8).