Hope, Hope, Hurray?

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Despite the data, Mark Greene finds reasons to be cheerful

“Woe, woe, three times, woe”, so beat the drums of doom on almost any measure of the social, emotional, physical or mental health of contemporary Britain… overworked, overtired, overspent, overweight, overdrugged … Is there hope for our muddled education system, careening from new initiative to new initiative, desperately trying to claw its way up the EU league tables? Is there hope for our children, the most miserable in the ‘developed’ world? Is there hope for our slave new world of work where the rich do indeed get richer and the rest of us get wearier? Is there hope for our community relations as the mounting fear of Islam builds an ever higher wall, razor-wired with suspicion and resentment on both sides? Is there hope when terrible events like the Bridgend teenage suicides no longer seem to be ghastly anomalies but harbingers of deepening darkness?

Only the most die-hard cynic or perhaps the most resolute realist would want to answer any of these questions with anything but a ‘yes’ – few of us can live without hope. But a ‘yes’ is too vague, too triumphalistic, too easy. Easter is not the season for easy answers. After all, the cross tells us too much about how sulphuric our sin is and too much about the cost of neutralising it for us to be blithe about the cost of planting and tending mustard seeds in the parched and polluted soil of the contemporary Britscape.

But, oh, how we need hope for a better tomorrow, a better today. For when hope fades, faith withers, loves shrivels… open hands close, arms fold, we look in the mirror not out of the window, our hearts plummet and our heads slump…

But hope there is. Hope in the light shining in Christian drug rehabilitation programmes that outperform government initiatives by over 60%, in young offender programmes with much lower rates of re-offending, in businesses run in radically different ways, in schools transformed by outstanding leadership and determined teachers… And there is hope in countless, literally countless, acts of individual caring – a prayer here, a meal there, a card sent, a coffee served, a job well done, a careful word, a listening ear …  Hope in graciousness under pressure, hope in generosity in adversity, hope in the selflessness displayed in a culture panicked into progressively deeper self-centredness.

Still, our hope does not lie in the reality that well considered Gospel initiatives offer ways of doing things that the world can mimic, though they may. Christian hope lies in more stable and ultimately more fertile ground.

Firstly, Christian hope attacks the meaninglessness that so many feel about so much of their lives. The Gospel is after all a Gospel for the whole of life, for Monday as well as Sunday, for work as well as church, for school as well as leisure, for the body as well as the mind, for eating as well as praying. The Gospel of the King who came to reconcile all and renew all, the Gospel that tells us that we can do whatever we do for him is a whole-life Gospel that calls on us, as Brian Draper puts it, to live in the moment not for the moment.  

Still, hope lies not in just the assertion that everything is significant but in being given the resources to live out that significance. And the first reason there is hope to live in a new way is that we are new creatures. “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creature, the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Cor 5:17)

I take this at face value. I was a caterpillar. And when I was a caterpillar there were only two ways for me to fly:

1.    On a leaf’s back
2.    In a bird’s beak

Either way, I couldn’t do it on my own. But now I’m a butterfly and I can fly. What was impossible now is possible.

The Christian life isn’t meant to be lived on a naturalistic plane by simply accepting a new set of ideas. It can’t be lived that way. We have hope in the now because we are new creatures and therefore have a whole different set of capacities. I don’t have to behave this way, I don’t have to think this way, I can live differently.

Still, ontological change (change in my being) without fuel for the journey leads to earthbound stasis, discouragement and exhaustion. Nothing destroys hope and happiness faster than being asked to live a particular kind of life without the resources to do it… bricks without straw, steel without iron, holiness without the spirit. We need fuel.

We know that God resources us to fulfil his calling in all kinds of ways, not alone on the road like Christian in Bunyan’s tale, but through the community of believers, through providential provision, through sovereign intervention, but above all and through all and in all he resources us by His Spirit.

It is His Spirit that leads unto into all the truth. It is His Spirit that carries on renewing us. It is His Spirit that makes us aware of sin in order to cleanse and liberate us. It is His Spirit that creates in us that elemental ease, that seals in that sub-atomic sense of being deeply loved, that liberates contentment.  And it is His Spirit that is the source of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – all those characteristics that would make a really good recipe for the happiness that is so rare in our culture.

It is God’s spirit that helps us see God’s glory in a smile, or a sandpiper, or a quadrilateral equation and give him glory. It is His Spirit that helps us in the maelstrom of the everyday, that re-shapes our attitudes and our sense of the potential for divine glory in ordinary situations.

Hope, however, does not necessarily change circumstances or change outcomes. Life is still hard, seeds planted are eaten up, acts of kindnesses are rejected or ignored, people get sick, people die of outrageous diseases, of scandalous starvation, people are hacked to death by machetes… Evil finds ever more creative ways to surprise us and intimidate us as the Coen brothers so powerfully explore in No Country for Older Men. How are we to respond? Give up? Hunker down in the ghetto? Turn up the volume on the iPod? Buy a new pair of shoes? We need the long view, we need the eschatological framework.

In the end, justice will be done. In the end, every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. In the end, all those who rejected our kindness, mocked our faith, scoffed at our sometimes feeble acts of defying the darkness, will give him glory.

Eschatology is our antidote to apparent failure and futility. We know that in the end no act is insignificant, we know that in the end He will turn all things to good. Our role is to do what the Master asks and leave the results to him, confident in his justice and promises. Indeed, our eschatology should not make us passive in the present. Rather, as Paul puts it in Colossians, the eschatological hope radiates back into our present lives and changes behaviour now:

“ …  we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints because of the hope laid up for you in heaven.”
Colossians 1:5

Faith and love grow out of hope. Our capacity to trust and to love God and love neighbour is fuelled by the assurance of what we have to look forward to. We trust because we have been granted a revelation of the one who is trustworthy. We love because he first loved us. And won’t stop loving us.

Indeed, it is vital to remind ourselves that these lavish gifts of ontological transformation, of pneumatological resource and eschatological promise cannot be co-opted by those who don’t know Jesus. These are His gifts to His people. Ultimately our hope lies in relationship with Christ. The one who died for us is the one who lives in us. The one who calls us is the one who pours His life into us. Christ is the hub of it all.

Paul travels many miles for Christ, writes many things, plants many churches, sees the Spirit work in miraculous ways, but what is his overriding motivation? Knowing Christ. Indeed, you can’t escape the thrill in Paul’s writing, the sense of gratitude, of awe, of wonder. Christ is fantastic. He just adores him, delights in him, wants above all to press on to know him. You can’t escape the sense that Paul’s obedience springs from love and that perhaps that love is partly because God is joyous to know.

Sam Storm puts it this way in One Thing (Christian Focus 2004):

“Happiness is the whole soul resting in God and rejoicing that so beautiful and glorious a Being is ours. Happiness is the privilege of being enabled by God’s grace to enjoy making much of him forever. I’m talking about the ineffable and unending pleasure of blissful union with and the joyful celebration of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

This is not to advocate the romanticism of some popular worship songs but it is to remind ourselves that our God is not a mere concept to be admired, a skills coach to be grateful to but a person to be adored. Yes, we yearn for a life of authenticity, we yearn for awe, for agape and for adventure but the yearning for adoration, to adore a person, to bring delight to another, to love with all our soul and heart and mind and capacity is deeper than any other. Amazingly, no one desires such adoration more than our God, no one delights in it more, no one has done more to make it possible and no one returns it so lavishly and freely than the one who gave His son for us.

Herein then lies our hope for now and eternity. Hope because every aspect of my ordinary life is significant to him; hope because I have been changed on the inside; hope because the Spirit empowers; hope because in the end all that I have done for Christ will bear its proper fruit to his Glory; and hope in the reality that not only can I seek to obey my King as master, but, amazingly, I can bring delight to him as His child and friend.

Hope, hope, hallelujah.

Mark Greene