Our Hope

What is the hope of the Christian Faith? This is something I’ve been studying personally for a few months now, specifically how that question relates to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

I would be lying if I didn’t say that my studies have turned up unsuspecting answers to that question. My own answers were surprising as I really had to digest the fact that many of my presuppositions and “answers” were just oral traditions that  translated into canned phrases that I learned while growing up in Christianity without ever delving deeper into topics like these and developing critical thinking skills around such conversations. Instead I had reduced my hope to “going to heaven one day.”

But is that really what our hope is as followers of Jesus? Is that the sum of the resurrection of Jesus? Could there be significantly more that we are overlooking (or in many instances oversimplifying) by collapsing all that Jesus accomplished through His death and resurrection into some sort of heavenly bus pass?

Answering these questions will take more than one post, but I figured I’d throw them out there for immediate thought provocation. I’d really like to explore each of these questions and then maybe bring it all back around to what the answers imply for our lives right now.

But first, we have to settle the question: what is our hope as believers in a resurrected Savior? For so long and in so many respects, I have always heard, assumed, been taught (directly or indirectly) that our hope as Christians is that we get to go to heaven when we die. Jesus beat death on the cross so we now have forgiveness of sins which translates into getting our name on the list for the after party of the millennium. In fact, when we mention words like “salvation,” many times people automatically assume that you’re talking about going to heaven. But as I’ve been studying the scriptures along with N.T. Wright’s “Surprised by Hope” (read a little here) I’ve come to the conclusion that I may have had a lot of unbiblical ideas about what our hope is as followers of Jesus. For one, our hope is not heaven as a final destination. It’s sooo much broader and deeper. But just to scratch the surface, our hope is to be resurrected ourselves.

Think about it… The scriptures tell us that Jesus beat death! He overcame it and was resurrected on Easter morning! And now that same hope has been offered to us, we too will be resurrected, we too will ultimately beat death! Now this has a ton of implications, especially when you stop and study WHERE this is all going to happen? Heaven? Paradise? Purgatory? The wild blue y0nder? Nope… Right here on planet earth. As you study the Bible, you begin to understand that heaven is more like a waiting room vs. a final destination. In fact, heaven is not our final destination. Yes, there’s life after death. But what about life after life after death? Remember that crazy thing called resurrection? And what about how the resurrection points to many other things that God wants to do on the planet both now and in the eternal future. What implications does this hold for all creation? It implies, for one, that a redeemed and renewed planet earth is actually our final destination.

See, if dying and going to heaven is our hope, then we really have no “skins” in the game here on earth. What’s our motivation to pray, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” as Jesus taught us to pray? If it’s all about going to heaven, who cares about the environment? Who cares about all the injustices now and in times past? Who cares about anything right here, right now? We’re just waiting to get out of here and hopefully take an “elect few” with us.  But when you stop and consider what the resurrection of Jesus truly implies, you have to stop and re:think all of that escapist behavior and mentality.

The reality is, dying and going to heaven isn’t beating death. If Jesus had just died and gone to heaven, no resurrection, we wouldn’t say that He had beaten death. No, it would be tragic and we would have no hope at all (Read 1Cor. 15:12-19). But in the resurrection of Jesus we get a sneak peak at what lies ahead for us… and for ALL of creation. The resurrection of Jesus has brought God’s future rushing into the present, and we get to be part of that renewal and redeeming process. That should give us enough to chew on for now. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic. Peace!