What hope does ‘the hope that is in us’ (I Peter 3:15) offer to the world in which we live today? That is the question to which I will address myself.

Jesus said ‘when it is evening, you say, it will be fair weather; for the sky is red. And in the morning, it will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening. You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times’ (Mt 16:2-4).

The Pharisees and Sadducees had just asked Jesus for some extra ‘sign from heaven’, and with these words he refused it to them: sufficient signs are already there, if they choose to see them: the signs of the times. Good Pope John frequently made use of this phrase, appealing to the modem church to read correctly to day’s ‘signs of the times’. Elsewhere in the gospels Jesus is reported as prophesying extensively about ‘signs’ in the future — nearly all of them very fearful signs: earthquakes, wars, famines, and ‘all this is but the beginning of the sufferings’ (Mt 24:8). We have certainly no proof that we are now in the age when ‘the end will come’ (Mt 24:14), and it would be foolish to leap to that conclusion: Christians have tended to do so time and again in times of human disaster and have, afterwards, often been left looking a little silly. Nor can we begin to surmise what the last age, described uneschatologically, will be like when it arrives.