Reflection: Not What We Had Hoped (May 4, 2014)

3rd Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:14a, 36-41; 1 Peter 1:17-25; Luke 24:13-35

The two disciples walking on their way to Emmaus said more than they realized when they told their unfamiliar fellow traveler about Jesus. “We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” they said in resignation.  Both the words that they used and the tense of their verbs showed that they didn’t understand Jesus’ mission and purpose. In the first place, they saw Jesus as the hope for Israel rather than the hope for the whole world. Secondly, they used the past perfect tense when they talked about their hope, a tense that indicates that an action was completed at some point in the past before something else happened. In their case, and by their admission, they stopped hoping that Jesus would redeem them when they saw Him die on the Cross. At that point Jesus went from “is” to “was” in their minds and He continued to be “was” even after they had received the reports that He had risen from the dead. The possibility of His resurrection did not restore their hope because it was not what they had hoped for in the first place.

Like those two disciples, we can find ourselves in circumstances in which what we had hoped for has faded from the realms of possibilities. And, like them, we may continue to hold onto our ideas of how things should have been or could have been rather than recognize that what we had hoped for in the first place wasn’t what was best for us, maybe even not what was good for us. When we hope for healing but God allows us to continue suffering through a disease or injury, we may question God’s compassion because we aren’t receiving the healing for which we had hoped. When our personal lives are spinning out of control and we are looking for a way to keep from being overwhelmed by our circumstances, we may doubt that God cares about us as the peace and prosperity we had hoped for fades away. In many other ways we find ourselves disappointed or frustrated or depressed because we have hoped for the wrong things. We hope for comfort, ease, and happiness, but we rarely hope for the Cross. Even when we do, we hope that the crosses in our lives pass quickly and won’t affect us too much. Fortunately, the Lord does not give us what we had hoped for. Instead, He moves us to hope only in Him. When we do, He richly and abundantly fills our lives with joy that exceeds our desired pleasures, peace that defies our circumstance, and hope that will never fade into the past tense.

Click here to listen to the sermon "Not What We Had Hoped" (or right-click to download the MP3 file).