Vaclav Havel, poet and once President of Czechoslovakia, said, "The deepest and most important form of hope .. is something we get, as it were, from 'elsewhere'." This is the 'hope from elsewhere' that Isaiah was chosen to convey to the Israelites of his time. He saw and described in beautiful poetic language nothing less than a new Creation where both nature and humans forget their animosities and are reconciled. In such a world would God's purpose be at last fulfilled. Isaiah was not merely looking forward to the restoration of a just ruler for Israel, but was pointing to a hope that no human monarch could fulfil, a hope of a kingdom stretched beyond this world. It was God alone who could produce the new order that Isaiah preached.

Today's Gospel account of the healing of the paralytic concretely exemplifies this vision of hope - "The lame shall leap like a deer:" (Is. 35:6). No wonder the crowds that witnessed the healing acclaimed "We have seen strange things" (Lk. 5:26) for these are the things of the new order for which Isaiah held out hope. The late Cardinal F.X. Nguyen Van Thuan in his "Testimony of Hope" wrote, "It is in the present that our adventure of hope begins. This is the only time we have in our hands. The past is already gone, and we do not know if there will be a future. The present moment is our great wealth."