In 1944, when she was just 13 years old, the Nazis arrived in Mady Gerrard’s home town in Hungary. Mady’s family was Jewish and so under the Nazi regime they were forced to wear the yellow star of David, which Mady called the “cruellest, most humiliating” of the Nazi policies. In that summer of 1944, Mady and her school friends were sent to the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Of 13 girls only two survived. Mady, now 90 and living in England, was one of them. She relates how every night, overnight, they saw the flames and smelled the smell of the crematorium. She speaks today of living with the guilt of surviving when so many of her friends died. Mady Gerrard attributes her survival to the fact that she never gave up hope.
Today we are aware how important hope is for one’s survival in trying circumstances. Studies have been done that have confirmed the importance of hope in survivors of the holocaust.
It’s interesting that hope is a strong component of the Christian faith. The apostle Paul comments in Romans chapter 8 that it is “in hope that we were saved”. The apostle has just highlighted that we live in a broken world that is groaning in pain – a pain which he compares to labour pains – the labour pains of a new creation that God is soon to bring about. And then he remarks that it is in that hope that were saved. We have the confident hope of a new world that is coming and for which Christians are eagerly waiting.
The problem is that in our present culture hope does not appear to be such a confidence-building concept. Someone asks whether tomorrow will be fine and sunny and you tell them that you hope so. But the fact is that tomorrow we may have some unexpected showers. You ask a friend whether she is still planning to visit next week and she tells you that she hopes to be there. But the fact that she uses the word ‘hope’ introduces and element of uncertainty. Things may yet happen that will prevent your friend from visiting. A colleague of mine recently pointed out to me that in our society we have changed the meaning of the word ‘hope’ to that of desire. Our desire is for the weather to be fine tomorrow. Our wishes are to make that visit to our friend. So if we say, “I hope so!” we are expressing our desires even while we recognise that what we long for, may not actually come to pass, due to unforeseen circumstances.
In contrast the hope that the Bible speaks about is an absolute certainty. It is not surrounded by lots of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’. The day is coming when God will renew His creation. We have God’s promise that when we trust in Jesus the hope of a resurrection to live in God’s new world is real. We can bank on it.
Here it is interesting that the Bible uses the image of an anchor for our Christian hope. The writer to the Hebrews says, “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul”. And the reason for the confidence is that this anchor of hope is hooked onto Jesus who has gone into heaven as the sovereign ruler of history.
Holocaust survivors are marked as people who had hope. The Christian’s hope is designed to get you through the toughest circumstances of life. Droughts and fires, floods and pandemics, but though it all we have this assurance that Jesus will never let us go. If you want to be a survivor make sure that the anchor of your life is grounded in Jesus.
John Westendorp