Hope isn’t very fashionable right now. Turn on the radio or the TV and the same messages come through time and again. We’re in a financial mess, and even the experts daren’t say when we’ll be out of it again. Other countries are in the same boat as the UK, or worse off; I imagine that Zimbabweans would be glad to have only our anxieties to cope with, rather than inflation, famine, disease and dictatorship. Just now, the book of Job may chime in with their feelings.

Job knows that the disasters which have befallen him – loss of crops, animals and house; even worse, the death of his children – are not his fault. Others keep telling him to turn away from his sins and back to God, but he knows that they have missed the point, for he is suffering innocently. And the very fact that Job’s story is in the Bible speaks for the many people of faith who find their lives almost too much to bear.

A brief flash of hope dawned on the horizon for many with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in the United States. Indeed, the hopes of so many have rested on him – for racial justice, peacemaking in the Middle East, staving off environmental disaster and so much more – that it seems impossible that one man should bear them all and come through without disaster. As I write, the Republican party has voted against his first effort at financial recovery, so I suspect he’ll find the honeymoon is over pretty quickly. Yet Obama has written a book called ‘The Audacity of Hope’, which indicates that he knows he’s in for the long haul, politically and personally. Whatever our politics, he will need our prayers as he endeavours to pull the world’s most powerful country out of economic despair.

The apostle Paul also knew he was in for the long haul, once he’d got over the first enthusiasm of believing that his fellow believers were bound to recognise Jesus as God’s leader, the Messiah. Those who did not share his new trust in Jesus often clashed sharply with Paul, and as he went from town to town, he could mark his progress by beatings, stonings and arrests. So Paul writes about suffering from the inside. Unlike Job, he could have chosen not to suffer. He could have gone back to Tarsus, lived a quiet Jewish life and put aside his vision of Jesus. But that was not his decision. Yet Paul’s choice to encounter daily opposition was no masochistic desire to be punished. He believed that ‘suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope’. When we suffer, if we refuse to give in to its pain, we become more able to bear it, less likely to be deflected from our ultimate goals by it. And that ability to endure through suffering, come what may, gives us the hope that things can improve. Maybe physical suffering will decrease, as circumstances or medical knowledge improves. Maybe mental suffering will decrease as we learn that we can endure more than we thought we could. And God’s transforming power can work in ways we never expected.

Jesus’ disciples on the Emmaus road would agree with that. They had just been through the worst week of their entire lives. Just as they had hoped that God’s kingdom of justice and joy was around the corner, their beloved leader had utterly failed in his mission. Jesus had been betrayed by one of his closest followers, had been arrested and tried as a political prisoner, had been hanged on the gallows. How could things have gone this wrong? Their entire lives had been turned upside down and inside out, to the extent that they were willing to pour out all their distress and share their dangerous political views with a chance-met stranger. And what is Jesus’ response to their confusion? Not a denial of their suffering or his own, but a staggering statement of hope in the midst of despair: that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer before entering into glory.

Why was it necessary for Jesus to suffer? Not because he deserved punishment: the idea that only the guilty suffer had already been put out of court by Job’s story. But because we human beings suffer, through our own fault, the fault of others or no fault at all, Jesus chooses to be our companion in suffering, so that we may become his companions in glory.

If I’m not careful, that may sound uncomfortably like ‘pie in the sky when you die’. I do not believe that God’s transformation is only to be hoped for after death. On the contrary, like the Christian Aid slogan, I hope for life before death. Such hope is painful to maintain, in the face of the news, in the face of suffering in both those we love and those we have never met. Yet in the end, as I believe President Obama knows well, it is God’s Spirit that is in the painful process of forming within us a Christlike character, one which is shaped by but not limited by suffering, enabling us to live that audacious hope which the world needs to know: that (thank you, Julian of Norwich!), all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well.