On Wednesday of last week, my wife gave birth to a new life. Joshua Paul Buckwalter was born on March 20th at 12:16 p.m. weighing 8lbs 2oz. He is a healthy, happy little boy. We're calling him Josh. The birth of a child can bring some amazing perspective to things. This is his first Sunday at church, and I'm already going to use him as an illustration. Poor kid has no hope for not being embarrassed by his father in front of people. Such is the life of a preacher’s kid.
I figure at this point he doesn't mind. He's not aware of much, and all he does is eat, sleep, and poo. But I guess that's all he is supposed to do.
I'm not sure if it's the birth of a baby itself that lends all kind of perspective to things or if it’s the journey that the parents take together that leads to that point. There's a lot of expectation, a lot of waiting, a lot of hoping that goes into the process. A lot of hope.
For new couples, the question is if they can actually have kids. Are they sterile? The hope is that they aren't. The hope is that all of the things that are supposed to work, biologically speaking, will work. The anticipation and expectation are great when a couple first sets about to have a baby. That first month, they wait, and they hope, and they wait until the results come in. Will we have a baby or not?
Some end up waiting a long time. Some, hoping against hope that the test will come back positive. Months turn into years, years turn into frustration and anxiety, and eventually, when it becomes apparent that the couple will not be able to have their own child, even after science offers all the help it can offer, the hope that the couple could have their very own child – hope dies.
They question, “Why can't we have a child? Why us? This isn't how things are supposed to be!”
I don't presume to understand these feelings. Josh took a little longer than we had wanted to happen, but I can't imagine the feelings of despair, the feelings of hopelessness that must come to couples who want to have their own children but can't. I just can't imagine it.
For some couples, new and older, getting pregnant isn't hard. The hope that they will be able to create a new little life is fulfilled. Great joy, mystery, and hope fill their hearts as they begin to dream about what their child is going to look like, what he or she is going to act like, what kind of person will they grow up into? Will they be a doctor? Will they be an athlete? What color hair will they have? Will they be good looking like their mother? As the pregnancy progresses, the hope and expectation grows and grows until you just can't stand it anymore. When will this baby get here?
Tragically, for some, their hope never comes to pass. Something happens, something goes wrong, and the little life is lost. Again, I can't presume to understand what this is like. But every time I hear of a couple who has a miscarriage, I feel like I've been kicked in the gut, and all I want to do is cry. All of that waiting, all of that expectation, all of those questions about what that child will be like, go unanswered. It must feel utterly hopeless; it must feel like, for a long time anyway, that hope has died.
This is what has happened to hope in our passage from the Gospel of John. Hope, well, it has died. Jesus, who has been saying a bunch of things about who he is, about the life he is bringing to a dead a dying world, about the light he is bringing to a dark and lost world, all of those things, at this point in the story, won’t happen. Hope is now dead.
The disciples have believed in this Jesus guy. They've believed all that he has said about being light, about being new life, about connecting them to God the Father in a way they haven't known before.
They had hope. They had expectations. They've asked questions wondering what it's really going to look like when everyone knows that Jesus is the Messiah. They have hopes and dreams about their part in the kingdom that Jesus was bringing, the Kingdom of God.
It's as if they were expecting parents. Only they weren't expecting a child, they were expecting Jesus to bring a new kingdom, a kingdom in which God's chosen people would be special again; they would be free again, they would be what God had intended them to be again. But something had gone wrong, terribly wrong, and now Jesus was dead. Hope was dead.
As far as our passage goes, the only thing that Mary Magdalene was expecting to find when she reached Jesus' tomb was a dead and lifeless body.
She arrives at the tomb and finds it empty. With all of her hope gone, the conclusion she comes to is that someone has taken Jesus' body. It didn't even cross her mind that perhaps all of the things Jesus had said about raising from the dead had been true. So, she panics. She takes off in a dead run to inform the disciples that the body of her Lord had been taken.
Once she has delivered the bad news, Peter and the disciple that Jesus loved, probably John, also take off in a dead run for the tomb. John wins the race and arrives at the tomb first. But he is hesitant to go in. Peter arrives, out of breath, and immediately enters the tomb. They find exactly what Mary had described, an empty tomb. Jesus’ burial cloths were lying inside.
The text says that they went inside and they saw and believed. The sentence is rather ambiguous. What did they believe? Did they believe that Jesus has risen from the dead? The author doesn't tell us what it is that the two believed. The next half of the sentence gives a little clarity, "for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead." What it is, in the absence of hope, that they have believed is that Mary is correct and someone has stolen the body.
Believing that Jesus’ body had been stolen, they turn and walk away. Jesus is still dead. Hope is still dead. Things weren't supposed to turn out this way. Things were supposed to be different.
But this isn't where the story ends. Hope might appear to be dead for Mary and the disciples, but it isn't.
The disciples have left poor Mary at the tomb all by herself. There is nothing more to see, nothing left to do, so they left. It didn't matter that Mary was standing there crying her eyes out. They had their own problems to attend to. After all, they had given up everything to follow Jesus.
As Mary stands there weeping, she decides to take one last look into that empty tomb to confirm for herself that the body is gone. She leans over and looks into the tomb to see two angels dressed in white sitting where Jesus' body had been. They ask her why she is weeping. Mary responds declaring that someone has stolen the body of her Lord and teacher.
I find it interesting that this short conversation that Mary has with the angels is so normal for her. She isn't shocked, she isn't amazed, she isn't calmed or even tipped to the fact that if there are angels here perhaps things are not as they seem. When she finishes answering the angel’s questions, she simply turns around to leave this place of sadness and hopelessness.
Mary begins to walk away but notices another man standing in the garden. She thinks he is the gardener. The man asks her why she has been weeping. Mary's response is the same; someone has taken the body and placed it somewhere else. She pleads with the man to tell her that he knows where it is.
Then, as quickly as Mary's hope had died with Jesus on the cross, it is reborn as Jesus calls out her name. “Mary!” She rushes to embrace him, but Jesus tells her not to because he has not yet ascended to the Father. Rather, Jesus gives Mary a mission – to tell the disciples that Jesus is alive! Hope has been reborn!
For Mary and for the disciples in the passage that follows this one, hope has been reborn. The hope that they had in Jesus Christ is alive and well, and it is the last word. Hope is the last word. Hate has not won. Violence has not won. Death has not won. Sin has not won. God, through the power of suffering love has defeated all death, all sin, all sickness, triumphing through resurrection. Hope is the last word.
It may seem, though, as we look out over our world and country, over our lives and the lives of our friends that there is still no hope. We look out and sometimes all we can see is war, starvation, homelessness, child abuse, aids, cancer, addiction, death, and sickness of all kinds. Some of us have stared those things straight in the eyes and have yelled at the top of your lungs, “This is not how it was supposed to be! Things were supposed to be different!” It may seem, in fact, to you, that hope is dead.
But the hope that we have in the Resurrected Jesus Christ is a lot like the waiting and hoping and expecting we do when waiting for a baby to be born.
For a long time, the signs of the hope of a child are barely visible or perceivable. But it is there.
The hope that we have as Christians, the hope that comes from the Resurrection which we celebrate today, is a hope that is here, but that is not yet complete.
It’s like a new life inside its mother’s belly. It’s there, its forming, but it isn’t yet here. It’s growing and one day it will be born into this world to be fully what it should be, fully what God intends it to be.
The hope that Christ brings is the Kingdom of God, the time when the world will be all that God has intended it to be…when all that Adam and Eve’s first sin destroyed will be made right. Jesus’ birth, life, and resurrection are like the conception of a baby, it’s the beginning of the coming of God’s Kingdom, it’s here, but it isn’t here in the fullest sense yet.
So now, with the birth, death, and resurrection things have been set in motion; it gives us hope. We long for it as new parents long for the birth of their child. We hope and dream about what it will look like, what it will be like when Christ returns and all things will be made right. We yearn for the total end of sickness, of death. Today, we have hope because the world is pregnant with the Kingdom of God.
It’s because of the hope that the Resurrection brings that we continue to have babies. Continuing to bear offspring is an act of hopeful defiance. It shouts in the face of a violent and chaotic world that we believe that God is in control, that God is working towards the world’s redemption.
It’s because of the hope that the Resurrection brings that we have hope that our dead loved ones in Christ are not really dead but are safe in the arms of Christ and will one day raise to new and eternal life in Christ.
It’s because of the hope that the Resurrection brings that we have hope that the sin that entangles and dominates us can be overcome, can be defeated here and now.
It’s because of the hope that the Resurrection brings that we have hope that the sickness that has broken us, that has sucked the life and vitality out of us can be cured.
It’s because of the hope that the Resurrection brings that we have hope that one day Christ will return and make all things new…
So, today, for us and for every man, woman, and child, hope is the last word. When it may not seem like there is any hope left in this word, we must remember that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again!
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