Hope is one of the hardest things to sustain and yet, even when struck by a global pandemic, the world still wanted to believe and say that everything was going to be alright. Such was the case even here in Europe, where we are supposed to belong to this old, cynical Continent. How could that be? Why is there hope?
Depending on where you stand, answers may vary. As Christians, it is kind of our job to believe in hope. So let me try to supply an answer to the question “Why should Christians in Europe be brave about sharing the Gospel?”
Let’s be honest: in Europe, we’re not that famous for finding answers (we prefer finding new questions), much less for sounding optimistic when having a Christian faith. We tend to be the crowd that secretly enjoys when successful people from other places come here to fail. But I’ll try to encourage everyone to be hopeful, noting three things (and, being Portuguese, cheering people up is a beautiful irony and, God willing, a very big miracle).
At bottom, Christians are not hopeful because their hearts tell them to be so, but because Jesus does. Much of the time, hope is what we have despite whatever we hear inside us. Let’s remember the scene of our Lord’s birth (for instance, in Luke 2:8-11). Some shepherds rest during the night and they get terrified by a supernatural vision of angels. What’s that all about? God is engaging them, giving them “news of great joy”—the Messiah is born. It’s good news, but it’s the kind of good news that frightens you to death. And this is why, in Scripture, hope—and certain things connected to it, like joy—strangely appear as commandments. Real hope comes, for the Christian, hand-in-hand with real problems.
When we work together as European Christians, we are generally experienced in failure. Something remotely near to a surrounding Christian culture is definitely in the past, not in the present. In Europe, no evangelical Christian sounds more convincing because he brings a lot of personal victories. We live on a continent where evangelical Christianity is more about resisting than winning, and that’s okay. What makes the gospel truthful is not our ability to win over our adversaries but the fact that Jesus won over death—we go on being hopeful.
Last year reminded us that fear is still very much alive, and not dealing with it is not an option. We should use the Bible’s alphabet to engage the world, especially now that everybody’s talking so much about mental health. For years we have been hearing that the “Where will we go when we die?” question was outdated, but the pandemic showed that death still scares us on a very public scale. The Coronavirus may have given us new masks, but it also took away from the face of public discourse death’s disguise as something elegant, private, and comfortable. When facing hard times, people will admit that something can go very wrong inside themselves. And that’s death waiting for people in the end, and death already inside their lives while still here. We are hopeful because we are not denying the darkness that really surrounds us all; but we are professing that Jesus Christ is Lord even over hell. Let’s trust him.
