My simple answer to the question, “What is hope?” is that hope is a belief about the future that combines expectation and desire. In other words, it is a belief that a positive outcome is in the offing, with at least some assurance that the hoped-for outcome will indeed come about. It follows that what we hope for in the future will then necessarily impact how we live in the present. To give a couple of banal examples, if I’m hoping to graduate from school in the spring, I might begin looking for a job or applying for university now so that I have something in place once the expected graduation occurs; or if I hope to go on a big vacation next year, I might have to live more frugally this year. The two keys that make hope practical, as opposed to wishful thinking, are therefore desire (as I mentioned earlier) and agency—the ability to act in the present in a way that impacts the future.
While the basic understanding of hope I’ve just set out applies to Christian life as much as it does to non-Christian life, there are some important considerations that set Christian hope apart. Before I leap into what those considerations are, I think it is necessary to say a little about the relationship between hope and faith. Faith, hope, and love, the famous Pauline trifecta (à la 1 Corinthians 13:13), are tightly tied together (and just happen to be RLN’s themes of the first three months of this new year), faith and hope particularly so. Hope rarely stands on its own as a biblical virtue, and while I can’t refer to a specific theologian or tradition for corroboration, it seems to me that hope describes what we believe, while faith describes how we believe it (in thought, word, and deed). This is why hope and faith are constant companions in Scripture; as James writes, faith without works is dead.¹
So what, then, is Christian hope? Speaking generally, Christians hope for many things, often expressed in our prayers for ourselves and others. However, put in light of the Advent and Christmas seasons we’ve just traversed, and the revelations of Epiphany, these smaller hopes are wrapped in the grand, cosmic, ultimate hope of Christian faith: “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” (cf. the Nicene Creed). The corresponding line from the Apostles’ Creed is even more specific in that we look for the “resurrection of the body.” To put it another way: all the scriptural tradition, Christian history, and present Christian life is working its way toward the final coming of Christ when the dead shall be raised bodily to be judged, and heaven and earth will come together in the final consummation of the kingdom of God. N.T. Wright’s 2007 volume, Surprised by Hope, says a great deal more on this matter, and I hope you will seek it out if you are at all confused by what I’ve just said or am about to say.
As a child, I assumed that the “resurrection of the body” meant Jesus’ bodily resurrection at Easter, and that the “life everlasting” would be spent in the clouds of heaven with aharp and a halo. Four years of graduate studies in theology offered some correction to this perspective, and I now understand Christian belief about “the end” to be more in line with the 1st Century Jewish belief in a bodily resurrection and a renewal and transformation of all creation, “visible and invisible” (thanks again to the Nicene Creed). Jesus’ clearly transformed flesh that can ignore locked doors and is difficult even for his closest friends to recognize is a foretaste of what waits for all of us on the far side of our own deaths and upon Jesus’ second coming.
Different interpretations of the end times have shaped Christian practices and attitudes about all sorts of things through the ages. For instance, some Christians believe that the church has no responsibility to care for the earth and its non-human inhabitants because they expect that God will burn the whole establishment down at the end of time, while those of us who have a more material view of eternity take quite the opposite tack to climate change. There are of course many other examples, which I don’t have space to tackle here, so I will again commend to you Surprised by Hope and spend the rest of this article discussing the implications a view ofthe future that is material and bodily has for our present conduct, both as individuals and as the Church at large.
C.S. Lewis wrote in The Weight of Glory:
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be ofthat kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.²
We are, in this present life, growing toward our true selves, which are “hid with God on high”³ and will be revealed in the transforming resurrection. We cannot reach this full potential until we ourselves have passed through death and been (bodily) raised to new life with Christ, but foretastes of the new creation are available in this life for those who would pick up their crosses and follow Christ. We are not, as some Christians have assumed, building the kingdom of God on earth, nor will we accomplish this undertaking during the extent of human history. We are, as Paul writes to the Philippians, working out our salvation in fear and trembling.4 You may choose not to agree, but N.T. Wright suggests that this life is in fact the only Purgatory we’ll be given, and that any growth we experience in this life will carry over to the next one. Our call as Christians, therefore, is to seek the life of the kingdom of heaven here on earth, expecting that the cost of joy will be the discomfort, pain, and even suffering that comes from resisting the regime of sin and death, which, though defeated in Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, is not retreating quietly.
Thus, to seek freedom for the oppressed and enslaved, to love our neighbours as ourselves, to pray without ceasing, and to gather regularly to worship God, is work done in the service of our Lord and is not wasted. To seek to preserve the beauty and health of all creation is not to waste time caring forsomething that will be incinerated and re-created from scratch, but to walk together with the rest of creation toward the glorious hope of resurrection and transformation. To speak truth to power and to resist the encroaching corruption of consumerism (and the other “isms” that twist the Gospel to their own ends) is not defeatist, but liberating and life-giving, not just to those who are oppressed and downtrodden by the powers that be, but to us as well. The more we seek God, the more we become like Christ, and the more we become like Christ in this life, I suspect the less it will hurt to have the corrupted parts burned away by the fire of the Spirit at the final resurrection. Hope is the map for this journey and the fuel for the fire that lights our way. Jesus Christ is the root and anchor for the hope I have outlined above, and his Spirit within us and within the Church is the assurance of things to come. A life that truly seeks Christ may have its ups and downs, its periods of doubt and faith, its sorrows and its joys, but it will always be moving toward that sure and certain hope of God’s victory over sin and death and the renewal of all things in Christ.
- James 2:17.
- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (HarperCollins, 2009), 62.
- Colossians 3:3.
- Philippians 2:12.
