There’s a lovely rather humorous poster that was popular some years back of a drawing of an old train such as Stevenson’s Rocket, which has arrived at the end of a pier, not been able to stop and has fallen off. There it is at a forty-five-degree angle surrounded by bemused Victorian gentlemen in top hats. The poster is accompanied by a short expletive which I shall translate as ‘Oh dear!’

It’s an attractive image, in part for the sense in which it gently and humorously underplays disaster, but in the main because of what it says about human living. That whatever confident plans we make then things sometimes go wrong despite our best efforts.

We will all have experienced those moments where whatever good intention we have started the day with, it has completely gone off the rails. Sometimes this can be a deeply serious and life-changing challenge as we deal with the various areas of our lives, such as relationships, money, our health, our work and so on. And then on a bigger scale it’s a feature and a reflection of our world, where within the canvas of the whole human family the decisions made in one part of the world deeply and profoundly affect the lives of those in other regions and communities for the worse. We need look no further than Ukraine for a specific example, although the imbalance in the distribution of our use of the earth’s resources provides us with many more examples. Some have an overabundance while others suffer and die through lack of basic needs being met. Some people are treated as commodities, while others make money from that suffering! There are more as you will know.

How are we to engage with the idea that there is still a sense of hope in our world if this happens to us and to our neighbours, that is, those whom God commands us to love? Why do bad things happen and how do we cope with them?

It remains, it seems to me, one of the eternal mysteries of the Christian faith that we hold dear at the centre of what we believe, a sign of dismal failure, in the cross. As we approach Good Friday the cross will be more and more on our minds as we prepare, through prayer and worship, to ‘witness’ once again that lingering, painful, dying of one innocent but excluded and rejected by popular society! One whom we believe encapsulates perfect human living in love of neighbour and of God. What could be a more disastrous ending to a good life?

And yet in that sense of divine irony and contradiction of human expectation, the cross is a sign of enduring hope for all Christians, and we’d claim, for the whole world. The question; ‘how can that be?’ then lives alongside the knowledge that it is also profoundly true.

There are many, many writers who have been able to help us reflect on this mystery that seems so removed from what we wish for ourselves and yet at the same time is something deeply bound up in the basic essence of what it is to be human.

So three brief things on the hope in light of the cross to offer here, knowing that there will be much more that remains unsaid!

The first is ‘presence’. There is something deeply important about simply being in the company of another when things go wrong. Whether this be as we accompany someone to a challenging event or medical intervention, or when we value someone by being at the bedside of a person who is dying. Being present can be vital and comforting in that we understand at some level that human suffering is a shared experience even if it’s a case of one person in travail and others empathetically alongside them.

‘Presence’ has been an underlying subject for all of us as we’ve experienced the rigours of covid19 over recent years. We’ve so often not been able to be present with others, and especially loved ones, when we would have liked to have been. It’s important for us!

At the heart if the Christian faith is the presence of God with God’s people, in the person of Jesus and then through Holy Spirit in the life of the Church and in word and sacrament. This plays out the faith that we have that the words in Matthew 28 where Jesus tells us that ‘I will be with you to the end of time’, are true for us and our world and have implications for how we live in love.

There is hope in knowing that we are not alone in the trials that the universe throws at us, and that it is God who remains our companion on the road all along whether we know it or not. We can be inspired by the words of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24) meeting a stranger as they believed then; ‘did not our hearts burn within us’ they say later on about that experience, that encounter, that presence!

Indeed the very foundation of our faith, the incarnation, is vitally about ‘God with us’ – Emmanuel – as we are told in the birth narratives in Matthew (echoing Isaiah). There is great hope in the thought that we are always united with God who is in turn united with all people at all time through the presence of God’s Spirit.

The presence of another human being can bring hope to a situation in which we might have considered ourselves alone in the trial we face. God works through human beings of course whether they be someone who walks with us, or someone who hangs on a cross for us!

Then secondly, hope is found in the faith that we can have in God’s future.

I am always struck with the words of St.Julian of Norwich, that unidentified woman who was hermit at the church of St.Julian; “All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”. There is a supreme optimism in these words based on a life that was not without isolation and suffering but that embraced confidence in God’s providence.

It may seem to us that simply saying that despite the suffering that a person is going through, telling them that ‘it’ll be OK in the end’ is a bit insensitive. It is certainly not something that trips off the tongue easily when one is sitting at the hospital bedside for example! Even if one does have confidence in medical procedure.

But I think that Julian meant something a little different. That in the total experience of human living, there is with us, a loving God who does indeed get what it means to be ‘you’

or ‘me’ in all we face because God has been there too. And that it remains the case that being held in the love that is universal, there is value to being the human person we are.

The Christian faith tells us that the God of love cares for us in all circumstances. There is hope then in exploring how that is true for particular, often personal, situations as we look to our future.

The third element of hope, following on from this, is that it is relational. Always relational. We have hope in another person, or we have hope in a situation filled with people. Jesus hope in humanity leads him to a sacrifice in love, so perhaps we can seek to live that out a little!

There may be many aspects of the life of Christ in which we can locate hope, but let us be struck by the constant ability of Jesus to cross the different social barriers that society so often sets up to exclude, demean and disempower. The Gospel accounts are full of surprising accounts of inclusion and of breaking the rules that set us apart. What else would expect of ‘love’ to be honest!

In each of these moments a risk is taken, a barrier is crossed and a previously ‘stuck’ situation for a person becomes on filled with hope for a transformed present and future. In a person’s life, in a collective human situation, we catch once again the original purpose of God for people, the creation that in the beginning was seen to be ‘good’.

As we approach Good Friday and Easter we are again blessed by God in the death and resurrection of God’s Son. Hope through presence, hope through continuing care, hope through showing us that what we thought was the case can be filled with resurrection life.