Easter Hope
Hope is a word we don’t really seem to be hearing a lot at the moment, and yet it is a word I believe we need to hear. I’ve recently been reading an interesting book by Miroslav Volf called ‘A Public Faith’. In the book he looks at how we, as Christians, could and should be living in this world and working towards the good of all. Volf compares optimism and hope in a way that I believe is helpful for us at this time of uncertainty. He explains that optimism is looking at the past and the present, and then making our best predictions for the future based on what we can already see.
In light of the Covid-19 pandemic optimism might involve looking at the flattening of the growth curve of cases in Germany and predicting on that basis that we can do the same in this country sooner rather than later. Optimism can be helpful, but it doesn’t give us any guaranteed outcomes; things might happen in that way, but equally they may not. On Maundy Thursday the disciples saw Jesus arrested, tried and crucified. They would have had little optimism based on their predictions of what would happen next. In fact the Bible tells us that some just went back to fishing because they had little, if any, optimism for the future.
Hope, however, is rather different. This is what Volf says about it,
“Hope, on the other hand, has to do with good things in the future that come to us from ‘outside,’ from God… We hear the word of divine promise, and because God is love we trust in God’s faithfulness. God then brings about ‘a new thing’... the crucified Jesus Christ is raised from the dead”.
In other words hope is not based on people’s best predictions or expectations for the future, using the best information available to us now. Instead Hope is “the expectation of good things that come as a gift from God”. God, our Heavenly Father, is the one who created this world and everything in it. It is God who has given us all the gift of life and who sustains us day by day. Through his word he has given us wonderful promises of the future gift of eternal life in his son, Jesus Christ.
Hope is so much better than optimism. Hope is something in which we can trust because it comes from God. When God says He is going to do something then we can have faith that He will do it. It’s not the kind of ‘hope’ that we might think about when we say, ‘I’m hoping for the best’. That kind of ‘hope’ is really no more than optimism or even wishful thinking. When we look to the future we can have a true hope that because we are loved by God, and are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, we will spend eternity with God. That’s not to say that we can guarantee our health or happiness in the meantime, although Jesus has promised to be with us through the best and worst of times.
Instead we can live knowing that God loves us and will never leave us nor forsake us. The apostle Paul describes Him as “the God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.” (Romans 4:17) With God nothing is impossible. In the Gospels we read of Jesus raising a few individuals back to life, such as Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter, but I don’t think this is really what Paul is getting at here. Rather Paul is pointing us to Jesus’ death and resurrection, and through that our ultimate resurrection when Jesus returns. This isn’t a vague possibility, but rather God’s promise to us in Jesus Christ.
So as Easter Day approaches try to remember the good news of the Gospel. Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, hallelujah!