Hope in uncertain times
The first day of the year is always tinged with excitement and joy.
At the stroke of midnight last Dec. 31, we welcomed 2026 with dazzling fireworks displays and earsplitting firecracker blasts, hoping that the loud noise would bring us the best that the new year could offer. The contrast between this boisterous merriment and the gloom, sadness, and disappointments that might have marked the previous year is striking.
Before the advent of artificial intelligence, we had been acquainted with editorial cartoons and holiday cards showing “baby new year” clad in a white diaper and brimming with joy, while the end of the year was being depicted as an old, grumpy man with furrowed brows and emasculated skin. His appearance betrayed the battles he fought so hard during his yearlong existence, which weighed heavily on his shoulders. This fast-moving scene reaches its apotheosis every Jan. 1, with the baby and the old man personifying life (or rebirth) and death, respectively.
On New Year’s Eve, we bid farewell to the negativity that the soon-to-expire year has brought us. Thus, the dawn of the new year is always a beacon of hope for new beginnings, no matter how we celebrate it. The reason, for one, is that we made it through another year. Another fact is that we really don’t have control over our lives in the strictest sense, much less over time itself. What we can do is be thankful for being healthy and alive, which allows us time to make amends or contribute to a broader change in society that serves the common good.
“National reckoning.” Admittedly, if we review the past year, there’s not much reason for hope on a national scale, at least politically. The INQFocus’ yearender, “2025 Recap: The numbers that staggered a nation,” (12/28/25), said it plainly: “These scenes were not new, but by 2025, what followed was unprecedented: a national reckoning driven not by speeches, but by numbers.” Beyond the few corruption cases filed, so far, “these numbers reframed corruption not as an abstract crime, but as lost work, failed protection, and broken trust—felt most sharply by communities that were promised safety from floods, but received neither the infrastructure nor the accountability they were owed.”
Besides the raging corruption scandal over flood control projects that was exposed by President Marcos himself last July, the political maelstrom was triggered by the opposition crying foul over the “blank items” in the bicameral (bicam) conference committee report on the 2025 General Appropriations Act (GAA) in January; the failed impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte initiated by the House of Representatives in February; and the arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte in March.
Following the midterm elections, we have been consumed by investigations into the flood control mess for the rest of 2025, besides the back-to-back storms that brought more flooding, and this national saga continues to this day. It remains to be seen whether the increased lump sum funding for lawmakers’ pet projects and programs under the 2026 GAA, which was ratified on Monday, could worsen the crisis that has gravely shaken confidence in the government.
Uncertainty vs hope. In 2025, the nation faced a political crossroads. Can 2026 be any different? The future is always uncertain because humans are not all-powerful and infallible. We don’t know what’s coming next. But seeing Jan. 1 as a point representing both continuity and discontinuity could help us accept that uncertainty, when we have no control over desired outcomes, is a fact of life.
Is expecting better days ahead this year an irrational hope? Whether as individuals or as a people trying to have a better life despite official abuses and rampant pillaging of national coffers, we can find hope. Hope should not depend on our personal and national circumstances.
Using a Christian perspective, we can see hope personified in the birth of Jesus Christ in first-century Roman-subjugated Palestine. He was born in a manger, bereft of the trappings of power that were expected of a Messiah in whom “the government will be on his shoulders” (Isaiah 9:6). The incarnation of Christ continues to define the present grace that Christians receive, despite the fall, and it foreshadows the future hope in the glory that will surely come at the Parousia.
But the paradox between present grace and future hope in Christ is causing tensions in our time, as politicians often portray themselves as modern-day messiahs who promise miracle cures for what ails society, and voters often fall for this ruse.
In “Counterfeit Gods” (2009), Timothy Keller described this phenomenon as “political idolatry,” which “accounts for the constant political cycles of overblown hopes and disillusionment, for the increasingly poisonous political discourse, and for the disproportionate fear and despair when one’s political party loses power.”
Quoting Reinhold Niebuhr, Keller explained that “in political idolatry, we make a god out of having power.”
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