Blessed Are Those Who Hope Still

John 20:1-11

Introduction

If someone was to ask you what the scariest thing to you is, what would you answer? Would it be snakes, spiders, the dark, heights? While heights would be near the TOP of my list, there is one thing that is scarier than all of those things: hope. That might surprise you as we think of hope as a positive thing. We should all hold onto hope. That is correct in theory but is more difficult in reality. The scary thing about hope is that is asks for a commitment from the inner most part of us without any assurance that it will follow through.

When I think about this, I think of an experience from almost ten years ago. Our eldest son, who has autism, had just begun living in a group home. He had a history of running off and the police had been involved more than once, even when he lived with us. One late morning, Amanda and I were sitting in the living room when we were called by the group home. Our son had been missing for a couple of hours and they were just now calling to let us know. We arrived at the group home to see the street lined with police cars. Apparently they let him wait for the school bus outside by himself and when the bus was late, he ran off. They had been searching for hours without any sign of him. We had heard of a number of recent stories of autistic children running off and being found dead. Needless to say, we were panicked. I couldn’t just sit there, and so I hopped in my car and began to drive around, looking for my son. I felt the familiar wrestling match with hope. Do I dare hope that we would find him alive after being missing for hours in a busy city? After all, I had watched him run in front of cars many times. If I gave in and let myself hope, what would happen if we received the call that they had found his body as had happened with so many other autistic children? Considering hope filled me with fear. But my son was so important to me that I had no other choice. And so I hoped and hope did not disappoint. My son walked 9 km to the next city to arrive at his school, having memorized the route from just a couple of months of bus rides. He was safe and sound.

Do you have a story like that? Have you been in a place where you had so much to lose? Did you have hope dangled in front of you, teasing you with the possibility that things will turn out alright? Sadly, hope does indeed sometimes disappoint. For every child that is found safe, there is another who stays missing or is found dead. Hope is never a guarantee that things will turn out the way we want. And yet hope does not offer itself cheaply, even with the uncertainty. I remember a time that I planned to embrace pessimism. The plan was that if I always expected the worst, then I would always be either correct or pleasantly surprised. It was very logical but it wasn’t sustainable. Human beings are created to need hope. And so even knowing that life is uncertain, I choose to live with hope. I major part of this emerges from the hope that is found in Jesus Christ. This is especially found in the Easter message of the resurrection of Jesus. The description of his followers wrestling with hope helps us in our own journey.

Hope of the Disciples

Every detail found in John’s description of the resurrection has a message for us. The story begins with an early morning visit to the tomb by Mary Magdalene. We are told that it was so early that it was still dark. That early morning darkness is a strange time. There is much that is hidden and unknown but there is that promise that the sun will soon rise with all sorts of new possibilities. When she got to the tomb, she saw that the stone that been blocking the entrance had been rolled away. She ran to Simon Peter and another disciple and told them that somebody had stolen Jesus’ body. How did she know. It does not say that she looked in the tomb but it was a logical conclusion. After all, why would someone roll away the stone other than to take the body? We might ask, why she didn’t consider that perhaps Jesus had risen from the dead? It was well known among his followers that Lazarus had been raised from the dead and he had been in the tomb longer than Jesus. I think Mary was afraid to hope and so she focused on the worst case scenario.

Having heard Mary’s report, Peter and the other disciple ran to the tomb to find out what was going on. The other disciple reached the tomb first. He looked in without actually entering and saw the linen wrappings that had been placed on Jesus’ body. Peter caught up to his fellow disciple and entered the tomb for a closer look. He saw the cloth that been over Jesus’ head neatly folded and placed to the side. We are not told what conclusion Peter reached but we are told that the other disciple believed. Why would he believe when he had yet to have seen the risen Jesus? If you think back to the raising of Lazarus, he came out of the tomb still wrapped in linen cloths. And yet the linen wrappings of Jesus were still in the tomb and the head cloth was folded. That is not what would happen if this was the result of tomb robbers. They would have grabbed the body and gotten out of there quickly before getting caught. Something else had happened here. This was enough for the disciple to hold onto a hope that would give birth to faith. It was a risky hope, especially without more concrete evidence, but it was hope enough.

This brings us back to Mary. Peter and the other disciple had gone home, leaving Mary standing by the tomb. Why did she not leave with them? What was she expecting to see? Someone began to speak to her. We know it was Jesus but she did not recognize him. What stopped her from recognizing him? Some have suggested that Jesus’ resurrection body looked somewhat different from what he looked like before. Others have suggested that her eyes were blurry from weeping. Could it be that she thought his voice sounded familiar but she was afraid to hope? Could it be that she loved him so much that she could not make herself vulnerable by even considering that he was alive? Eventually Jesus spoke to her plainly and she was faced with the risen Jesus. She was the first person that Jesus had revealed himself to and she was also the first person carry the confirmed message of the resurrection. The hope that all of the disciples struggled with was shown to be based on a real event in history. Jesus was and is alive.

Hope of the Church

How is your struggle with hope going? Is life filled with difficulties? Can you even begin to hope that things will get better? Do you have hope that God sees your suffering and that he cares and will intervene in some way? Do you have hope that your life is safe in the arms of God, for now and after death?

I would like to offer you three easy steps that will prevent you from ever struggling with hope again. But I can’t. Hope is scary. There have been too many times that we have hoped and have been disappointed. Hope will never be easy.

I find some comfort in the fact that the disciples who knew Jesus personally, who heard his words with their ears, who witnessed his miracles, and even saw him raise the dead, still struggled with hope. Hope is hard.

But blessed are those who hope still. 

My favourite novel is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. While it belong to the fantasy genre, it actually touches on some deep truths. If you are not familiar with the story, the only way to save the world is to destroy the ring of power before the dark lord Sauron can regain it. But the only way to destroy it is to cast it into Mount Doom, a volcano that is in the realm of Sauron, where he is strongest. And the one tasked with this mission is Frodo, a hobbit, one of the weakest beings of Middle-earth. Approaching the final battle, we listen in to this conversation between Pippin, another hobbit, and the wizard Gandalf.

Pippin took Gandalf’s hand.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘is there any hope? For Frodo, I mean; or at least mostly for Frodo.’

Gandalf put his hand on Pippin’s head. ‘There never was much hope,’ he answered. ‘Just a fool’s hope, as I have been told.

Do you ever feel like you are only holding onto a fool’s hope? In The Lord of the Rings, the hope proves true and the ring is destroyed, Frodo survives, and the world is saved. Of course that is because Tolkien wrote the story and made it happen that way.

But what if we are part of a story, a story by a certain Author. I am not suggesting that God controls our every action and choice but that he more than just a mere observer. What if God has a story of us, a story for our congregation, and a story for the Church? What if that which looks like a fool’s hope to us is actually a hope built on the plans of God?

Conclusion

A number of years after the events described in John, the Apostle Paul travelled around the Roman Empire preaching the gospel. Paul admitted that people resisted the message, seeing it as foolishness. The reason for that reaction is that a crucified Messiah should be definition leave no room for hope. With the last breath on the cross ends the last grasp for hope. Except the last breath was not the last breath. The stone rolled away and Jesus walked out of the tomb. Hope was justified. 

None of this means that we will stop struggling with the concept of hope. It does not mean that hope will be any less scary. But it does point us to some solid ground for at least one kind of hope. If Jesus really walked out of that tomb, we can never be truly hopeless. The resurrection changed everything. And because of that resurrection, blessed are those who hope still.