LOOKING ahead with hope has never been easy. If the past 12 months have taught us anything, they have taught us that our world has become an even more difficult place in which to have hope for the future.
And yet, looking ahead with hope is surely what the Christian journey is all about.
We all have our favourite Gospel passages which give us hope. For me - along with the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus - the passage I find most inspiring is the one where Jesus, at the beginning of his ministry, announces the Coming of the Kingdom by reading the famous passage from the Prophet Isaiah.
And the reason I find it inspiring and hopeful is because he did this against a background of oppression, fear and almost total despair.
Beginning his public ministry, Luke tells us, Jesus stood before the congregation in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth and read the text from the Prophet Isaiah which declares: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom to captives and to the blind, new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord's year of favour." (Luke 4:18-19).
Many of his hearers that day didn't know much about Good News of any kind.
They did, however, know a great deal about Bad News. Their lives were full of it. They were used to discrimination, exploitation, hunger, high taxes, and news of beatings and executions.
Life under the Romans in that far-flung part of the empire was no picnic. The empire knew well how to keep its subjects in order.
Jesus' hearers that day were people who were systematically humiliated, a people without hope.
We're told that after he read the scripture - which those present had heard many times - he then said something no-one had ever heard said before: "Today, this passage is being fulfilled even as you listen."
That certainly caught their attention. Here was Mary and Joseph's son, who had grown up among them and been a member of their community for the best part of 30 years, telling them that this good news message foretold by the Prophet Isaiah hundreds of years earlier, was now being fulfilled in their midst even as they listened.
This was certainly news. What could it possibly mean?
Jesus was showing them another way of seeing the world and dealing with its issues and problems.
Basically, he was telling his hearers that even though their lives were nasty, brutish and short, they did not have to be that way; they could and should be different.
For too many people today's world has become a habitat of nightmares and despair - conflict, suffering, prejudice, the mess we are making of God's creation, the current pandemic...
In short, whatever else he gave them in that message and subsequent teaching, he gave them hope.
Jesus was a people person. He seems to have spent a great deal of time trudging the dusty roads of Galilee meeting with people, healing them in mind and body, and always offering them hope, with a word of comfort here, a word of encouragement there, even sometimes a word of chastisement.
He always met people where they were at and showed them how so much better their lives could be.
No-one who ever met him was ever the same again. He was always helping people to move forward with hope.
What he was giving them was something precious: an inner strength, a sense that their lives counted for something.
His message was exciting. And it is a message which still has so much to say to us today.
We also live in something like an end time. For too many people today's world has become a habitat of nightmares and despair.
One thinks of the numerous conflict situations, the unimaginable suffering of refugees and migrants, the prejudice against black people, and the mess we are making of God's creation.
Then there is the current pandemic which has been such a wake-up call for us all, exacting a staggering loss of life, leaving countless numbers of people bereaved, and many more ill or without livelihoods and hope for the future.
As Easter People living in a Good Friday world, our main task is to free ourselves from subjection to these huge fears which paralyse life and to fill the vacuum in our lives and the lives of others with the hope of the Kingdom.
All Jesus asks of us, as he did of those present that day in the synagogue in Nazareth, is that we believe in him and place our trust in him.
Thomas Merton once said that God does not ask us to be anxious, but to trust in him no matter how we feel.
How about that for a resolution as we face 2021 and beyond.
Fr Gerry McFlynn is a priest of the Down and Connor diocese, project manager at the Irish Chaplaincy in London and involved in Pax Christi, the international Catholic Peace Movement.
