“Fulfilling the Last Commandment: Our Anchor of Hope for Eternal Life”
Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Divine Hope
Mass for Annual Archdiocesan Women’s Conference
February 1, 2025; Immaculate Heart of Mary Church
Introduction
The other day I had the opportunity to have a conversation with a former member of Congress who, after serving several terms, lost his reelection bid because he was standing by sound moral principles with regard to the dignity of human life and of marriage and family life. He observed that things seem to keep getting worse, and admitted to being pessimistic. But he said he also had hope. He is not optimistic, but he is hopeful.
Trusting Beyond Time and the Visible
There is, of course, a difference between the two, and it is an important one. Optimism is an attitude whereas hope is a virtue, that is, a habit for doing the good which enables one to live righteously. Optimism looks to how things will work out in the future, with the conviction that they will work out for the best. It foresees that our efforts in the present will produce the results we desire in the future, such that if we make the right plans and execute them correctly we will attain the goals we desire.
Hope, on the other hand, looks beyond the visible and the temporal: it looks to eternity, as well as confiding in God that God will work things out within our own temporal order in a way that is best for our eternal happiness, even if it is contrary to the plans we would make for ourselves. Both optimism and hope orient us toward the future, but hope does so in a way that goes beyond the schemings of the human mind and beyond the temporal order. Hope is “the elevation of the will, made possible by grace, by which man expects eternal life and the means to attain it, confident of the omnipotent aid of God.”[1]
Since hope takes us beyond our human capacities and what they can determine for the future, it is intimately related to trust. In a timely decision, Pope Francis has given us the theme “Pilgrims of Hope” for this Jubilee Year. In his Bull of Indiction (the decree by which a Pope proclaims the beginning of a Jubilee Year), he speaks about the human need for hope and its lived expression as active trust in God. He opens by saying:
In the heart of each person, hope dwells as the desire and expectation of good things to come, despite our not knowing what the future may bring. Even so, uncertainty about the future may at times give rise to conflicting feelings, ranging from confident trust to apprehensiveness, from serenity to anxiety, from firm conviction to hesitation and doubt.”[2]
In this Holy Year of hope, we logically celebrate today this Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of Divine Hope. That is, divine hope. Hope that takes us beyond the world of time and space in which we currently live.
Our Model of Hope, the Personification of Wisdom
In her liturgy for this Votive Mass, the Church has us look to Mary as our model of hope, a hope that is grounded in wisdom. The reading from the Book of Sirach which we just heard proclaimed is part of a passage in which the gift of wisdom is personified, seen as the most intimate gift of God which can connect us to Him. This in itself, and indeed the whole body of Wisdom Literature in the Old Testament, is a manifestation of how hope in God does not disappoint even when we are faced with what appear to be disastrous results. The Wisdom books of the Old Testament are the latest parts written in that Testament, written after the disastrous conquering and pillaging of the kingdom of Israel and the people being deported into exile.
The world in those ancient times was predominantly Greek in its culture, language and ways of thinking. The Greeks were the great philosophers, and it was in this way that the scribes and rabbis came into contact with these great schools of thought. But they gave it their own Semitic twist: whereas Greeks philosophized in the abstract, in the Jewish mind wisdom is something practical, the formula for how to live well in this world. We can see our Lady as prefigured in this personification of wisdom. We can think of what it must have been like for her: certainly, no woman would want her son to be treated the way Mary’s Son was. But she saw through the human tragedy with the gift of wisdom that God gave her, to see God working out His plan of salvation for the world. And so she is the model for us, especially whenever we find ourselves in the most stressful moments of life.
It is most appropriate that the composition for the Mass setting that we are using today is the “Mass of Our Lady Star of the Sea.” The sea is a very dangerous place, where one is most especially vulnerable to the elements, and sailors have always invoked her protection. But this is really a metaphor for all of life: we all go through stormy seas at times. As Pope Francis says later on in his Bull of Indiction proclaiming this Holy Year: “It is not by chance that popular piety continues to invoke the Blessed Virgin as Stella Maris, a title that bespeaks the sure hope that, amid the tempests of this life, the Mother of God comes to our aid, sustains us and encourages us to persevere in hope and trust.”[3]
Doing as Jesus Has Done
This is our anchor in life, as we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews: “May we who have taken refuge in him be strongly encouraged to seize the hope set before us. We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered” (Heb 6:18-20). Pope Francis picks up on this verse of Scripture right after giving us these words of comfort, saying: “The image of the anchor is eloquent; it helps us to recognize the stability and security that is ours amid the troubled waters of this life, provided we entrust ourselves to the Lord Jesus. The storms that buffet us will never prevail, for we are firmly anchored in the hope born of grace, which enables us to live in Christ and to overcome sin, fear and death.”[4]
“Provided we entrust ourselves to the Lord Jesus.” This is exactly what our Lady commands us to do in the last words the Bible records her speaking. This is the commandment she gave to the waiters at Cana, which she gives to all of her Son’s disciples. It is her last commandment: “Do whatever he tells you.” It parallels the last commandment her Son gave us before dying for us: “Do this in memory of me.” This is what he tells us to do, and John’s version of the Last Supper makes it clear what that means: not simply enacting a ritual, but lowering ourselves to wash feet, to love one another as he has loved us, to lay down our lives for him and for one another. To do for each other what he has done for us.
Our Lady can give us this, her last commandment, because she is the model for fulfilling it, fulfilling the last commandment of her Son. Does this not come from the gift of her womanhood, which in her finds perfection? The gift of the intuitive sense of knowing – a different way of knowing, that gives assurance, sure hope, that God is working out His plan of salvation for each of us, even in the midst of the trials and vicissitudes of our life in this world. It is the gift that God has given all women, the “feminine genius” as Pope St. John Paul II was so fond of calling it, a gift so needed in the world today, even if in imperfect form due to the condition of original sin into which we are all born.
Conclusion
The attitude of optimism is a positive thing when it is realistic. But it is the virtue of hope that will take us from the struggles and joys, ups and downs of this life into the life of heaven. As pilgrims making our way through this world to the true promised land of the heavenly Kingdom of God, let us take confidence from the assurance that St. Paul gives us in his letter to the Romans that “all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Rom 8:28) – but always in God’s time and in God’s way. And may God give us this grace. Amen.
[1] Karl Rahner, ed., Encyclopedia of Theology A Concise Sacramentum Mundi (London: Burns & Oates, 1977): Hope, by Ferdinand Kerstiens, p. 650.
[2] Spes non confundit, Bull of Indiction of the Ordinary Jubilee of the Year 2025, n. 1.
[3] Spes non confundit, n. 24.
[4] Spes non confundit, n. 25.