The Clash of Hope and History

Most of us are incorrigible optimists. And I don’t just mean the happy, bubbly people who could see the bright side of a sewer trench. Most of us, no matter our temperament, have a sense that the world will ultimately be good. We may not have all our future plans clearly mapped out, and we may be in the midst of struggles right now, but the majority of us have an inarticulate but certain sense that in the future the world is somehow going to be made right. In a word, we hope.

But hope is a curious thing in this world so filled with seemingly hopeless tragedies. We suffer directly as we or our family members grapple with pain and terminal disease. We witness the immense suffering of others in seeing them lose children to deranged school shooters or (for tens of millions in the third world) to poverty and starvation. Even if it were possible to prevent every crime and provide all with food and medical care, we would still eventually grow feeble and die, and that doesn’t meet anyone’s definition of all right. And yet we still have it in the back our minds that everything will be all right? So where does hope come from?

It’s as if we live amidst the constant clash of two worlds: The world of hopeful desire on the inside of us and the world of hopeless facts on the outside. The question is, which of these two worlds is the real world? Thoroughly cynical people, who, interestingly, usually still try to live as if there’s a future to hope for, accuse Christians of being childish and willfully ignorant. They say we live in a dream--that there’s no real difference between our belief in Heaven and a child’s belief in the Easter Bunny. Neither are grounded in objective facts. We’re said to be “escapists” who retreat to our inner fantasies about God and Heaven because we don’t have the good sense and fortitude to face the world as it truly is.

And it’s at just this point that confetti explodes over Christians. The resurrection of Jesus was precisely the moment when the world of hope entered into the world of history: “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.” (Hebrews 2:14-15)

At Easter, and all through the year, we want to proclaim to all the stiff-lipped “sensible” people who base everything they believe on the hard facts of history that Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the dead is one of those hard facts! We thank God that Jesus physically rose from the dead, and in doing so he has "destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel" (2 Timothy 1:10). In the words of John Mark Mcmillan, he “laid Death in his grave.”

It really happened. Hope and history are one!