“Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.” If you’re a movie buff, you’ll instantly recognize those as words spoken by “Red,” Morgan Freeman’s character in the movie, “Shawshank Redemption” (or in the novella if you’re a bookworm). Now, if you are a real fan of the movie, you’ll know that hope is characterized by another character as “a good thing, maybe the best of things.” I bring this up because we hear so many different things about hope that seem to contradict each other. We’re told not to get our hopes up or to be careful about what we place our hope in, and then we’re told to cross our fingers and hope for good things or to believe that every cloud has a silver lining. So which is it? Is hope a dangerous thing or the best of things?
As it turns out, Jesus said very little about hope explicitly, but his followers talked about it all the time. Talking about hope and urging others to hope seemed to be a side effect of spending time with Jesus, and if we look at the things Jesus did and said around his followers, that starts to make sense. But first, let’s define our terms. When we talk about hope today, we usually mean Is Thanks, Oxford Dictionary. But in Jesus’ time, hope meant something a little bit different — in fact, we can just change the order of one word in that definition, and we’ll just about get there: in Jesus’ time, it seems like hope was a feeling of expectation and desire for a thing certain to happen. You see, hope was less about wishing for something unsure to happen and more about acting in light of something that was definitely going to happen — but just hadn’t happened yet. So which kind of hope are we going to talk about? As it turns out, Jesus’ life has something to say about both.
First, our own modern, garden-variety hope. There’s a pretty famous story that Jesus told called the Prodigal Son. From a 40,000-foot view, the story is about a son who cuts ties with his family, disrespects his father, runs away, squanders his inheritance, and then sheepishly returns home to be unexpectedly welcomed back with a great celebration. The end of this story is the part that gives us a glimpse into how Jesus sees hope. The way Jesus tells it, “while [the son] was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him, and kissed him.” I think Jesus included “while he was a long way off” for a reason: it evokes this image of the dad looking out the window each day, hoping to see his son walking down the driveway — hoping for something that is not certain to happen. Now that reading of the story is a bit imaginative, but even without filling in the blanks, the father’s celebration of his son’s return still meets our definition. He truly desired for his son to come home, and when he did, he celebrated. Jesus was painting the picture of a good father as one who hopes for the best for his children, even if his children don’t return the favor. Hope is a good thing, especially when our hope is pointed outward toward other people.
But Jesus’ life also shows us a bit about that second type of hope, the kind that lives in light of something certain to happen. Well, sort of. You’ll see what I mean. Jesus spent a lot of time with a rough crowd: tax collectors, drunkards, sinners. When confronted about it by the religious elite, his response was perfect: “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.” Jesus hoped for the best for the people around him the way a doctor hopes for the best for their patients. They don’t sit idly by wishing that a patient will get better — they find the root cause of the illness, develop a treatment plan, check in frequently, and do everything in their power to help their patient get healthy. They expect and desire for their patient to get better, and they work toward it. Jesus approached his relationships the same way. He wanted and desired the best for the people around him, and he worked to make it happen. This kind of hope is an active hope, and when you’re as committed a “doctor” as Jesus, it comes with a level of certainty that the thing hoped for will happen. It might not be 100% certainty, but it’s certainly enough to shift the hope from a simple desire to an earnest expectation.
Notice, though, that in both situations, Jesus’ hope was directed toward others. He hoped for the best for the people around him, and he taught his followers to do the same. What if we took a page out of his book and directed our hope outwards as well? What if we actively worked toward hope when we can, and still held onto hope when we can’t. I bet we’d start seeing and treating the people around us the way Jesus did.
