Hannah wanted to tell me about her friend Esther. She was sitting across the table from me and even before she began I could feel how hard this story was going to be for her. It was apparent in the pain that lingered in her eyes even when she smiled and the way she would sometimes pause in her speech as if suddenly afraid that she might give voice to something unspeakable. Hannah and Esther had grown up as children living next door to each other. They were almost exactly the same age and from the time they first began to walk, they had been inseparable. The two girls were together constantly. They shared everything. They shared their clothes. They shared their secrets. They shared their hopes. They were closer than any sisters.

The times were the 1920s and 30s, though. The place was the Jewish ghetto in a small town in Eastern Germany. As Hannah described it, the ghetto - the section where the Jews were required to live - was only a few streets, the lines dividing it from the rest of the town hardly even noticed. Everyone, Christian and Jew alike, knew everything there was to know about each other. In this small town the changes that came for the Jews after Adolf Hitler was elected to power in 1933 began slowly - extra paper work, a few inconveniences - but they mounted steadily. More and more the Jews were restricted. Jewish businesses were forced to close. Attacks and persecutions became increasingly common.

"What made it so strange," Hannah said to me in that soft voice of hers, "was that these people weren't strangers or some occupying force. They were people we had thought of as our friends." She paused and looked at me. "We went into their stores. They came into ours. We played with their children. Yes, there was a Jewish section and a Christian section, but until all this began we were one town. But then little by little the thugs took control and our friends just watched. Perhaps the injustices seemed too small at first to bother about - or to risk anything for. But they got worse. Much worse. And our friends said nothing. Then one day the soldiers came and told us we had to leave. We were going to be resettled into camps."

With that she closed her eyes and gave her head a small shake. This was followed by a wave of the hand as if to say, "You know what happened next." For several moments she remained silent. When she spoke again, her already quiet voice had grown even quieter still. She did not describe the long train ride to the camp in which she and all her neighbors were pressed so closely together into cattle cars that many died of heat or suffocation. She also related almost nothing of the camp itself. About that she said only three things. The first was that every man, woman and child who remained in that camp died. The second was that among those who stayed in that camp was her entire family, her parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins. The third thing she said, though, was that of her whole village only two were set aside to go somewhere else. She was one. Esther was the other. Both were seventeen. Both were strong, healthy young women.

At that point Hannah's gaze broke from mine. She looked away.

"The Nazis thought we could be of use to them," she said simply.

For months Hannah and Esther were sent from camp to camp. Somehow they always managed to stay together. The two girls who had been inseparable from childhood, were now much more than that. Each had become the other's lifeline. They still shared everything they had, but now that they had so little, this became a matter of life or death. If one found a little extra food, she shared that. A little extra courage, a little extra hope, she shared that, too.

By the winter of 1944 the girls were still alive but completely spent. If eighteen months earlier they had been healthy, young woman, they were that no longer. They were depleted, drained, close to starvation. The Nazis were still not finished with them, though. They were sent to one final camp. This was a slave labor camp and it was among the most brutal of its kind. Its job was to repair roads damaged by Allied bombs. The place needed a constant supply of new workers because every day that the teams went out they came back with so many fewer than they started with. Many of the workers collapsed from fatigue. Others merely gave up and lay down in the road. Either way, the result was the same: they were simply shot. The soldiers guarding them did not hesitate. To lie down was to die. The instant a guard spotted someone lying down he raised his rifle and fired.

The work itself was relentless, backbreaking. Day after day they dug, pounded rocks and carried loads of gravel. It went on from before dawn to well after dark. As bad as this was, though, Hannah now had a greater worry. After all that they had gone through it was becoming clear to her that Esther, too, had begun to give up. Esther no longer ate unless Hannah forced her. She never spoke, never responded to anything Hannah said. Most troubling of all was that Esther's gaze had now taken on the same empty stare that Hannah had seen in so many others in their final days, the stare of someone who no longer cared whether she lived or died.

Then one afternoon what she feared most happened. Hannah and Esther were digging together, clearing away rubble, when suddenly Esther stopped. She stood immobile, gazing into the distance. Slowly she let the shovel fall from her hand.

"What are you doing," Hannah whispered. She bent down, picked up the shovel and handed it back to Esther, but her friend would not take it. Her hands hung limp at her side. Her eyes, dull and glazed, had not left the horizon.

"Esther, Esther," Hannah repeated in a desperate undertone, "take...the...shovel... before...they...see...you."

Esther did not respond. Instead, to Hannah's horror, she slowly began to lay down, to stretch out in the middle of the road. Hannah knew that this was certain death.

"Stop it," she whispered. "Get up. Are you crazy?"

Frantically Hannah looked around. Where was the guard? Where was the guard?

Finally Hannah spotted him. He had his back to them. Quickly Hannah climbed down on the ground and knelt next to her friend. She knew that if the guard turned around now, they would both die. She grabbed Esther's shoulders and shook her.

"Get up," she said. "They'll kill you."

"What does it matter?" Esther answered. "Nothing matters anymore."

"No. That's not true. It's not true." Frantically Hannah tried to think what she could say to convince her. She knelt closer, bringing her lips right to Esther's ear. "No, it's not true," she said again. "You have to get up because...because you have to live. You have to live. You have to survive this. You are going to survive this. Yes...yes, you're going to survive this and... and you're going to marry, Esther. You're going to marry and have a child, a little boy.... I'm going to survive this, too. I'm also going to marry and have a child, a little girl. Those children are going to grow up, Esther. They're going to marry and have a child and that child will be our grandchild, Esther, yours and mine. That's why you have to get up, for the sake of our grandchild. If you don't get up, that child will never be born."

At that point Hannah paused in her story. She looked down at her hands, which were clenched tightly on the table between us. Several moments passed then she looked up at me.

"What do you think made me say that?" she asked me. "Do you have any idea?"

* * * * * * * * * * * *

"What do you think made me say that?" I have thought so often about that question.

Where does hope come from, after all?

Look at today's Gospel. What is so significant about this reading is that it immediately follows the passage that is perhaps the pivot point of the entire Gospel of Mark, the verses where Jesus asks his followers, "Who do you say that I am?" To this Peter answers, "You are the Christ," the Messiah. Now in today's reading, after just having told his disciples that he, Jesus - the man standing before them - is the very one for whom Israel had been waiting throughout its history, the one on whom all their hopes hang, Jesus immediately goes on to say something that seems to destroy all that. He says that he will soon undergo great suffering. He will be rejected. He will be killed.... At this, Peter rebukes him. And who can blame him? Jesus has just told them that he is the Messiah, the hope of humanity, but is this hope? ...Suffering?... Rejection?... Death at the hands of his enemies? True, Jesus also mentions something about rising on the third day, but what does that mean? You can almost hear Peter's disappointment...his anger: "Suffering, rejection, death? Is that what you have to offer? You call that hope?"

And yet Jesus' response is unequivocal. To Peter, the man who only minutes before has recognized him as the Messiah, he says: "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things." He then goes on: "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it..."

Hard words? They seem that way. In fact, though, Jesus is completely redefining the concept of hope. For Jesus, hope is not something occasional or incidental to life. It forms the very core of religious experience. He makes hope the central reality in our relation to God. This is a hope not built on outcomes, though. It is, in other words, a hope that does not depend on things turning out the way we want. It is a hope that finds both its beginning and its end in the same thing: complete trust in who we are in relation to God - beings loved by God, held by God... beings carried by God through all darkness, through all despair...through all evil.

"You are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things," Jesus tells Peter. Hope is divine. Optimism is merely human. Optimism is the belief that things will work out the way we want and be OK. Hope is the conviction that even if things do not work out the way we want they will still be OK, because God is with us. Against death, despair and evil, optimism alone is never enough. To meet forces as powerful as these we need something much stronger than mere human optimism. We need a divine hope, a hope stripped of all personal expectations, a hope that is also a form of surrender - a hope built on the certain knowledge that in the great matters of life and death, God is in charge so that no matter what happens, God is with us and we are with God. That is our hope, our consolation. It is this sort of hope that has even given a few remarkable individuals the capacity to do the seemingly impossible, to resist the temptation to oppose evil by using evil's own tactics, resisting this even though it meant certain death.

God is love. Our call is only to give that love, which is God, as fully and unequivocally as we can. We do this in the certain knowledge that ultimately this love will prevail even if we do not. It will live long after we die. It will triumph even where evil seems to have gotten the upper hand. "Who will separate us from the love of [God]?" Paul asks in today's Epistle. "Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril...or sword?" Such hope is itself God's great gift, the hope that in the end love will survive even when nothing else does. This is the only miracle we truly need. And yet, having encountered that miracle ...sometimes...sometimes...

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Hannah tried one last time. "Get up," she said again. "That child needs our love."

Esther gazed at her strangely. Slowly she stirred. She rolled over onto her side then little by little began to get up. Again Hannah glanced around, looking for the guard. She saw that he had started to turn back to them.

Hannah grabbed Esther and pulled her to her feet, but when she looked again it was too late. The guard had his rifle on his shoulder. It was pointed directly at Esther.

"Don't worry," Hannah called out to him. "We're working. Everything's fine."

For a moment the three figures stood as still as a photograph, two emaciated girls and a soldier with a rifle pointed at them. At last he made a quick motion with his gun, telling them to continue, then lowered his weapon and turned away.

"It was only two weeks later that we woke up one morning to find that all of the guards had vanished," Hannah said to me. "The machine gun turrets were empty. The soldiers had left. We couldn't believe it. Later that afternoon the Americans arrived."

Hannah and Esther spent several months in refugee camps, then each decided to try to locate any family they had left. Esther had a cousin in Paris. Hannah had one surviving uncle in New York, her mother's brother, a man she had never met. For the first time in their lives, the two women parted.

In New York, Hannah began to learn English and to attend classes at the university. It was there that she met a young medical student, an American, also Jewish. They were married and when he finished his medical training they moved to Maine where he set up a practice. Over the years Hannah and her husband had four children. Hannah kept in touch with Esther, who was also now married and living in Paris. Esther had two sons. When Esther's eldest son, Emil, was eighteen he came to live for a year with Hannah's family in Maine to work on his English. Soon after he returned home, Hannah's second child, a girl named Sophie, went to live with Esther's family in Paris to study French. Two years later Esther's son Emil and Hannah's daughter Sophie announced their plans to marry.

It was one year following that marriage that Hannah found herself on a flight to Paris. As she came through customs, the first person she saw was Esther. In her arms Esther held an infant, a newborn. This child was her granddaughter. The child was Hannah's granddaughter also.

As Hannah approached, she saw that Esther's eyes were filled with tears.

"How did you know?" Esther asked softly. "How did you ever know?"

At that point Hannah paused. Again she looked down at her hands, then returned her gaze to me.

"How did I know?" she asked at last. "Do you have any idea? How did I know?"

Amen