A Living Hope

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Scripture: 1 Peter 1:3-9;  John 20: 19-31

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…"

-- 1 Peter 1:3

What is the difference between a living hope and ordinary hope? Let’s begin with some reflection on ordinary hope as we experience it in the world. When we are sick we hope to get well, when there is war we hope for peace. Hope is the positive orientation of our minds to the future, the anticipation of good outcomes. It is an essential human energy; without it we fall into depression and are unable to muster the energy to do much to bring about good outcomes. Hopelessness in the sense of depression is a very widespread affliction in our nation today, frequently in its bipolar or manic-depressive form. Ordinary hope is a fragile thing; Emily Dickinson the poet compared it to a little bird, easily crushed or frightened away.

Viewing the world scene today we might say that the world needs hope as never before, but that would unfortunately be an exaggeration. We certainly need hope acutely and urgently but not uniquely. In any week in any year one could point to desperate situations in the world, and say that we need hope as never before; the need for hope is always urgent. Hope has always had to live in the face of its opposite, always had to struggle to prevail. So we should not automatically assume that the present troubles are the worst ever to have befallen the world and that the need for hope is uniquely urgent. The world is always more or less in a mess and hope is always needed!

Having said that, however, I must confess that I feel certain emotions about today’s situation of the Jews in Israel and around the world that remind me of the “end-of-the-world” scenarios in the Bible, what in the trade we call the apocalypses (like the books of Daniel and Revelation). I feel that there may be an element of uniqueness in the present, that something profound is changing. Whether they like it or not – and I have often argued that the Jews should not be branded a chosen people but simply left to live like any other ethnic group or political nation, which is also what the Zionists want – the Jews seem to be entangled in the history of the world in a special way, and their present struggle for survival in Palestine/Israel fills me with a sense of world-historic significance. The future of the world not just of two nations is at stake. There are nuclear weapons involved on the Jewish (Israel) and the Muslim (Pakistan) side, and the apparently unanswerable tactic of suicide bombing confronts us with young people consciously choosing the end of their personal world for the sake of the end of their people’s unendurable historical world.  The militarist response of the Jews in Israel seems to me to be profoundly mistaken. So Emily Dickinson’s  small bird of ordinary hope is sick and hard to find.

Ordinary hope that is healthy, as a phenomenon of this world, is based on realistic expectations about the future as it arises out of the present. We don’t hope to be successful at extreme sports when we are advanced in age, nor to be a renowned singer if our voice is not trustworthy outside the shower.  There is a danger in telling children that they can be whatever they want to be. So ordinary hope must be based on realistic expectations, but there is an extraordinary hope based on faith in the work of God alone, which last week I called Reality with a capital ”R,” and which this week our text calls “living hope.”

Look at the basis of this “living hope” as 1 Peter presents it:  “…we have been born again, to a living hope, through the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last days (1 Peter 1: 3-5).” The basis of our living hope is the living Jesus, who has given us an inheritance of eternal life in heaven, reserved for us until our last day, and finally to be given to the world at large on its last day. In the mean time we are guarded by God’s power, kept safe by Him until we enter heaven. Entering into this living hope is entering into a new world, an experience that 1 Peter compares to being born. “We are reborn into a living hope,” he says.

Now I know that this is very traditional stuff. This world is a vale of tears in which we should not hope for much happiness or justice, while the work of God in Jesus has built for us a perfect place where all our hopes are fulfilled. Do not expect justice in this world, but look forward to it in heaven. This is the traditional Christian position on hope and it was unchallenged in the West until the advent of 19th century socialist thought which called this religion the “opium of the people.” It was in the opinion of those socialists a ruse to deflect the poor from seeking a fair share of the wealth of this world, so that those who already had it could continue to enjoy its use unchallenged and undisturbed.

Is that description of this old-time religion true or false?  It is a piece of polemic and so mostly false, although at times and in places this Christian teaching has been used as a ruse to defraud the poor. In any case the socialist promise of justice for the poor in this world has for most proved to be a cruel illusion. For every rectification of injustice – and there have been several, like the freeing of the slaves, the enfranchisement of women, and in some countries the extension of wealth to middle classes – there have been new injustices or the intensification of the old ones. More than two thirds of the world still lives in poverty and hunger, and the record of socialism in providing worldly security for all has been about as mixed as its capitalist alternative. Therefore, ordinary hope for this world must always be modest and pragmatic, the arena of neither pessimism nor optimism but of sober perseverance.

So what is “living hope?” It is simply the living Jesus present to us after his resurrection and available to our faith, to which he gives the grace of a supernaturally based hope. This supernatural grace of living hope anchors our lives in heaven and thus enables us to persevere and from time to time even to triumph amidst all the failures of ordinary hope and all the fragments of broken dreams.  We endure as those who see the living Christ and know that he rose from the dead, and for that reason no longer fear death. Without the fear of death we feel as if we had been born again into a new world of living hope. We are those who have seen the risen Lord and confessed him as “My Lord and my God!”

In 1868 a shepherd discovered an archaeologically rich cave 19 miles from the town of Santander in Northern Spain. The area is named Altamira and the cave proved to be one of the great treasuries of Paleolithic art. The roof of the cave – 18 meters by 9 meters in area - is covered with magnificently realized depictions chiefly of bison, done in red, black and violet colors, majestically and magnificently. There are also wild boars, horses, anthropomorphic figures, human handprints and hand outlines. They date from about ten thousand years before Christ. The artistic riches of Altamira remained unknown to its hunter discoverer and to the first scientifically interested visitor, the nobleman Marcelino de Sautola, who in 1875 was looking for bones and flints and arrowheads, and came away without discovering the paintings. He went back again in 1879 and this time he had his five-year-old daughter Maria with him. While he was looking down studying the ground underfoot she was tugging at his hand and trying to get him to look up. When at last he yielded to her annoying insistence he made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of human art and archaeology. When at the tiresome behest of a five-year-old child Sautola looked up instead of down he discovered the sublime.

Well, we all know that Jesus favored the wisdom of children when it came to seeing and entering the Kingdom of God, and that Hans Christian Andersen knew it took childlike courage to state the obvious when the emperor was naked as a jaybird. One must be careful not to take illustrations for spiritual truth, but this illustration is at least an historical truth; a five year old did see what the professionals missed, and that might be just more than an illustration. The simple eyes of faith look up not down and see the glorious heavenly host watching over us. Such eyes can see the real basis for living hope, the Reality with a capital “R,” the living Jesus himself. Let your faith open you eyes to the living hope, Jesus Christ risen and triumphant.