Once, I had to help someone lose her faith. Kind of.
She was coming out of a prosperity gospel background in which people used the admonition “Have faith” to manipulate her into giving more money to the ministry. It was her lack of faith, they told her, that was to blame for her sickness and poverty. At one point, after listening to this woman lament her lack of faith, I said, “Why don’t we forget faith for a little while and just trust Jesus?”
Trusting Jesus is, of course, what the Bible calls faith. And in the fullness of time, I told her that. But before she could understand the reality by which she could live, she had to let go of the illusion by which she was swindled. As soon as she stopped worrying about how much faith she had and looked to Christ, she was, in fact, exercising faith. Lately I’ve wondered if the same is true for most of us in regard to another good word that has lost its meaning: hope.
My fellow evangelical Christians love the word hope almost as much as a pastor exposed as an adulterer loves the word grace. In almost every setting in which I speak, one of the first questions people ask is “What gives you hope?” or “Where do you see signs of hope?” When pressed to define what they mean, they ultimately describe what they’re seeking as measurable reassurance—the calming word from an authority that everything will turn out okay.
If I were braver, I would simply respond, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah,” (Matt. 12:39, ESV throughout). But I am made of squishier stuff than Jesus, so I usually give some signposts of good things to come. When I do that, though, I am giving them punditry or prediction, not hope.
By definition, whatever statistics I could give about Bible sales or church attendance would not be hope, even if these numbers were much better than they are. “Now hope that is seen is not hope,” the apostle Paul told us. “For who hopes for what he sees?” (Rom. 8:24).
Still, we want that visible, quantifiable reassurance, don’t we? I suppose everyone does, but perhaps evangelical Christians want it more than most. Even those of us who reject a prosperity gospel easily fall into a kind of “prosperity providence,” if not with our own lives then with the church itself. When the church is growing and successful, we seem to think this proves the gospel is worth believing. Somehow, even those who believe that the call to Christ is the call to come and die still think claiming health and wealth is okay, as long as it is for the mission and not just for us.
The problem, though, is that this kind of hope disappoints. When visible institutions and articulable ideas fall apart—and they will—those who thought hope meant upward progress feel duped and disillusioned. But if this cheap sort of hope appeals so much to our human frailty, then how can we move beyond it? Perhaps the season of Easter is a good time to remind ourselves that our Lord has already shown us the way out of the false hope and the way into the real.
The resurrection accounts of the apostles give us hope in the context of what seems to be utter despair. Perhaps no one described this more pointedly than Luke, in his account of the travelers on the road to Emmaus. They encountered a stranger whom we know (but they did not) to be the resurrected Jesus. Luke wrote that Jesus “drew near and went with them,” inviting them to express their dashed hope (24:15). Describing the Crucifixion, the pilgrim Cleopas said, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened” (v. 21).
At this moment, a Jesus who was more like me would have levitated in a burst of glory, saying, “How do you like me now?” But that Jesus would have already done that in Pilate’s courtroom or Caesar’s palace. Thanks be to God, that is not the Jesus we have. Instead, Jesus went back to where he always did: the promises found in the Word of God. And “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself” (v. 27). He then made himself known—as he does to us—in the breaking of bread.
And then he was gone. “And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight” (v. 31).
Faith, hope, and love abide after everything else has collapsed, the apostle Paul wrote (1 Cor. 13:13). Faith itself, the Bible tells us, is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). It’s the “not seen” part that troubles us—especially in a machine age in which we expect to control everything. The Resurrection, though, doesn’t “evolve” like a machine to be better and stronger. Jesus truly joined us in death. Hope seemed to be gone, except for God’s word in Christ that he would keep his covenant promises.
Christ is raised—physically, bodily, really. On the basis of the testimony we have received from witnesses, by the Spirit, we believe. For now, though, we see death everywhere. As I write this, children in Africa are gasping in agony as AIDS ravages their bodies. Between the time I type this and the time you read it, chances are that some horrible tragedy will be in the news—a tsunami, an earthquake, civil unrest, an epidemic. We believe the church will prevail against the gates of hell, but that’s because Jesus told us so, not because the scorecard of wins demonstrates it to us.
My impulse is to rush to the kind of hope that takes shortcuts around the suffering, endurance, and character by which real hope is produced (Rom. 5:1–5).
But genuine hope does not disappoint us, Paul wrote, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (v. 5). The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the Spirit who prompts us to groan inwardly as we wait (8:23). And in that groaning, sometimes too deep for words, the Spirit creates a different kind of longing, so that “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (v. 25).
That’s not what I naturally want. I want the hope that comes with observable signs. But that kind of hope is not focused on the resurrected Christ at the right hand of the Father. That kind of hope cannot survive the hearse ride from the funeral home to the cemetery. And that means that if I am really to have hope, I need to stop asking for signs and remember the sign of Jonah. But that one sign is enough. A tomb in Jerusalem is still empty. He is risen, just as he said. That’s real hope—the kind that, just like our lives, we must lose before we can find.
Somebody will probably ask me this week, “So where is the hope?” And I will try to give the person reasons not to despair. I will point to the younger generation, to what’s happening in the global church, to all kinds of statistics and anecdotes and optimistic predictions. But maybe what I need is for someone to take me aside afterward and tell me that’s all prosperity gospel bluster. Maybe I need that person to point out that even if nothing optimistic is happening, Jesus is still raised from the dead. Maybe that person can remind me of what I’ve sung since I was a toddler but keep forgetting: My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. All other ground is sinking sand.
Maybe that person could even say it this way: “Why don’t we forget hope for a little while and just wait for Jesus?”
Russell Moore is editor at-large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.
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