Speaking of hope

1. Introduction

All Christian speech, Nicholas Lash invites us to consider, must endeavour to be a kind of word-care. ¹ In a similar construction Rowan Williams remarks that, ‘[t]he right to be heard speaking about God must be earned’. ² For preachers such statements imply a non-negotiable accountability for the words they use, words that refer to God and words that offer an account of how this God has promised to be active within our world.

What follows is a brief attempt to speak of hope, a topic of Christian attention which involves us in thinking about nothing less than the ‘origin, essence, and goal’ of all time. ³ Like ‘justice’ or ‘love’ hope is one of those words that needs located in its fitting context so that we might imagine what it is to live responsive to a world charged with the promise of God’s presence. ⁴ Talk of hope therefore finds itself in the same situation as all talk related to God. Words must be found commodious, spacious, and transformative enough to keep up in some way with their referent. Such language of discipleship is not possessive but rather expansive, generous, and promissory. Hope possessed is no longer hope. ⁵ Our very language about hope must itself be hopeful.

How can we speak of hope? We can speak of hope only by attending to God’s action in time. If we live in time hopefully we can do so only because God has filled our time full with the promise of his presence. Put differently, what is told in the Bible is not a series of events ever receding into the past but a set of realities with the capacity ‘to illumine permanent structures of life’, the ability to sustain hopeful lives. ⁶ Before we turn to a fuller account of how such hope might be articulated I first need to say something about the nature of reading Scripture hopefully.

3. Hope: Creation, Jesus, and Israel

How best to sketch the nature of hope in a Christian register? The working assumption of this meditation is that talk of hope is sustained by fixing attention on history, which people of hope know and see as ‘God’s economy’. ¹⁸ The reasons for such an assumption are two fold. First, by calling to mind the particular ways in which God has shaped the history in which we dwell hope has the best chance of acquiring its proper specificity. To be hopeful is not the victory of wishful thinking but is a response to a series of promises made by God that punctuate time. Second, to say that history is punctuated by God’s promises is to recognise that moving into the future hopefully is sustained by calling to mind the ‘gracious’ deeds of the one in whom we hope (Isa. 63.7). It is these deeds that provide the necessary orientation for hope. That Israel could worship her God even while suffering the crisis of exile is, Robert Jenson tells us, explicable because ‘the future that moves a story must somehow be available within it if we are to live the story while it is still in progress’. ¹⁹ The God who we hope for reveals himself in time so that our hope for the future may not be without definition. Such definition of hope is what Christians practise in worship when they confess, ‘Christ is Dead, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again’.

In summary, speaking about hope is sustained by attending to three series of God’s actions within the history of the world: creation; Israel; and Jesus.

3.1. Creation

The hope that pulsates through Second Isaiah is nestled within copious references to creation, as if to reinforce the bond between created reality and redemption. Isaiah 51 for example speaks of the Lord, ‘who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth’ (Isa. 51.13). Elsewhere we hear that ‘[t]he Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth’ (Isa. 40.28). Such references prompt us to ask: how does the confession that we live in a created world sustain hope?

Creation is a source of hope because creation is gift – we are strictly unnecessary, here only by the loving turn of the God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit outwards. Creation is the excess of the love that flows among and within the everlasting fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet, as we are invited to see, in creating God does not wind up the world and let it go. God is involved in the world: he elects a people, Israel; he pitches up in the flesh of a first-century Jew; and he sends the Spirit to bring creation to its intended goal. All of this we can say is ‘the plan that is planned concerning the whole earth’ (Isa. 14.26). Robert Jenson renders this verse from Isaiah in more theological terms which are nonetheless helpful – if history has the kind of direction we have been indicating then history is not a byproduct of creation, rather God ‘creates a history that is a world, in that it is purposive’. ²⁰ In continually calling to mind creation Isaiah is therefore recalling the past works of God as a source of hope for the future. Hopeful action is intelligible in a world determined by God’s action. So we find that Isaiah 51 asks us to recall what God did at the Red Sea: ‘was it not you who…made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to cross over? So the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing’ (Isa. 51.10-11, see also Isa. 63). The one who has created the world and elected Israel is the same one who will save. ²¹ Hope for salvation and God as creator of heaven and earth are frequently placed together in the Old Testament, and can be found not least in the Psalms. ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth’ (Ps. 124.8). It is this very creator who promises a future in which ‘the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea’ (Isa. 11.9).

Creation, as the excess of God’s love, recalls us to the eternal love in which we are privileged to have a share. Of the love that is the cause of our being here rather than not here Augustine writes, ‘it is not after we were reconciled to him through the blood of his Son that he began to love us. Rather, he loved us before the world was created, that we also might be sons along with his only-begotten Son’. ²² To look to this kind of eternal love is to be beckoned to see the love of God as Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. Creation is a source of hope because in the beginning is promised the end. Or in the biblical language, God has declared ‘the end from the beginning’ (Isa. 46.10). God as creator, reconciler, and redeemer is both the truth of our genesis and the truth of our end:

Listen to me, O Jacob,

And Israel, whom I called;

I am He; I am the first

And I am the last.

My hand laid the foundation of the earth,

And my right hand spread out the heavens. (Isa 48.12-13)

Very similar language is picked up in Revelation where the risen Christ speaks, ‘Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead and see, I am alive for ever and ever, and I have the keys of Death and of Hades’ (Rev. 1.17). Precisely as creator, God summons into existence those things that did not exist, he gives life to the seemingly barren Sarah, he promises restoration to the exiled, he raises Jesus from the dead-end of death, and he offers a share in his life to all willing to follow. ‘I came that they may have life, and have life abundantly’ (Jn 10.11). Looking to God as creator is to remind ourselves that, ‘[o]nly the God who gave life in the beginning can give new life in the end’. ²³

3.3 Jesus

In what has been said to this point readers will have noted a certain pull towards Isaiah, hardly surprising given that part of what makes for Christian identity is a desire to read this text’s promises around Christ. The hope spoken of in Isaiah 51.4, ‘Listen to me, my people, and give heed to me, my nation: for a teaching will go out from me, and my justice for a light to the peoples’ is read by Christians in the context of the Gospels’ core conviction: Jesus is the enfleshment of God’s hopes for Israel, the light of the world (Jn 8.12). Simeon’s words at Jesus’ circumcision are significant here, ‘Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel’ (Luke 2.29-32). In a ministry that restores sight to the blind, allows the deaf to hear, raises the dead, and brings good news to the poor Jesus is the incarnation of his people’s hopes:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen in whom my soul delights;

I have put my spirit upon him;

He will bring justice to the nations. (Isa. 42.1)

The hope that cries out in Isaiah has for Christians a name – Jesus. Jesus embodies Israel’s ministry – something that becomes clearer the more we listen out for the echo of Isaiah 42 in the New Testament. We hear this text’s echoes in the accounts of Jesus’ baptism (Matt. 3.16-17; Jn 1.32-33), in the Transfiguration accounts (Matt. 17.5), and then again in 2 Peter, ‘for he [Jesus] received honour and glory from God the Father when that voice was conveyed to him by the Majestic Glory saying, ‘This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased’ (2 Peter 1.17). ³² As the one from whom the light of Israel has shone forth Jesus calls into fellowship with God those who were ‘aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope’ (Eph. 2.12). To receive salvation through Israel is to enter into fellowship with the creator who draws his creatures to himself, who in Jesus Christ says now to all people what he said to Israel in Leviticus 26: ‘I will place my dwelling in your midst …I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people’ (Leviticus 26.11-12). These words take on new resonance when read alongside John 1.14, ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’.

Recall the words of Isaiah 41.10 that we cited earlier, ‘do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God’. Very similar words are heard again from the mouth of the angel at the entrance to Jesus’ tomb, ‘Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified…tell his disciples, “He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee”’ (Matt. 28.5, 7). What does it mean to place our hope in the risen Christ? Three things stand out from these words of the angel at the empty tomb. First, hope can be narrated. Hope is located in a series of actions: Jesus’ crucifixion; Jesus’ risenness; and Jesus’ procession ahead of us. This attempt to place hope in a narrative is evident too in texts we have previously encountered from the Hebrew Scriptures, ³³ ‘Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth’ (Ps. 124.8). Psalm 105 would be another extended example. Second, to hope in the risen Jesus is to follow one who goes ahead of us. Because this one is alive he has a future he promises will involve us. ³⁴ ‘I am with you always to the end of the age’ (Matt. 28.20). Third, because Jesus is alive he is capable of surprising us with his future. That Jesus has the capacity to surprise is what lies behind the New Testament call to be vigilant for the returning Jesus. ‘[T]he day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night’ (1 Thess. 5.2), Paul tells the Thessalonian Christians. Hope is not ours to possess. Craig Hovey, picking up a cue from Robert Jenson, has written powerfully on Jesus’ ability to surprise us precisely because he is alive. ‘The resurrected Christ must be attested by a people who expect him to exercise the freedom that comes with living.’ ³⁵ With the help of Hovey we can say that hopeful people will be found following Jesus. Such followers of Jesus are headed towards an end which they hope for yet do not control. People who follow are necessarily ‘longsighted’ and open to have their imaginations stretched by the fullness of Jesus. ³⁶ By resisting the urge to collapse promise into fulfilment (here the question of whether we read Scripture in the manner we sketched above is key) Christians are drawn towards a hope that calls forth praise. It is no pious embellishment that at the end of Romans 11, after wrestling with God’s enduring promises to Israel in the context of the fulfilment that is the Christ event, Paul ends with a doxology.

4. Conclusion

How can we speak of hope? Christian speech about hope can say no more and no less than the name, Jesus. In Jesus, those who were not a people (1 Peter 2.10) have been brought near (Eph. 2.13). This Jesus is a ‘living’ hope (1 Peter 1.3) who bids us to be vigilant for his promised coming again. This hope, Jesus, has a history, for the love made visible in him is the love of the one through whom all things came into being. Edward Irving points to the pastoral succour to be drawn from the hope that our individual lives can be participants in the love that moves the world:

What an exalted birthplace and most noble stock doth it give to every creature, to me, to you, dear brethren, to think that we were seen of a long time, yea from the beginning of days, yea from all eternity…and were loved and beloved of the Father before all time, as a part – an essential part of His own dear Son…how comforteth it my soul to know that the Son Himself…should bring us back again into that most sure and perfect blessedness which he had, and which in Him we had, before the world was! ³⁷