We Have Reason to Hope Because God is With Us
By Amy Beange
As Advent season dawns, Christians around the world reflect on the profound mystery of the incarnation, the thing that separates our faith from all other faiths, and perhaps best expressed in Isaiah’s proclamation that Jesus is “Immanuel, God With Us” (See Mat. 1:23 and Isaiah 7:14).
This year the Faith Beyond Belief team selected “Reasons to Hope” as our theme. Over these past 12 months we have sought to produce content that was always more than merely an assemblage of facts, but that would continually bring us back to why perseverance matters—the hope founded in Christ. We live in interesting times, fraught with uncertainty. Norms have been overturned and the future seems up for grabs. Not that an uncertain future has never before been encountered, but it must be admitted that our present uncertainty is felt more deeply because Gen-Xers and Millennials have all their lives been accustomed to peace and prosperity. Nevertheless, hope is something we all need because the best of times still involve waking up every day in a fallen world where stuff happens.
“But hope, to be hope, needs an accompanying conviction that the present unsatisfactory state of affairs is not permanent.”
We need hope. Specifically, we need Christian hope because things are never quite what we would wish; life is out of key, dreams are unfulfilled, disappointments abound. No one hopes for something he already has. When things are right as rain no hope is needed—what purpose hope if we have everything we could need or desire? But hope, to be hope, needs an accompanying conviction that the present unsatisfactory state of affairs is not permanent, that help is possible and may even be at the door. Otherwise what passes for hope is little more than wishful thinking.
I just finished reading Unbroken for my ladies’ book club. It is the story of an American pilot shot down over the Pacific, who eventually found himself a guest of the emperor in a Japanese POW camp. Starvation, disease, and brutality nearly destroyed him. But the sight of Allied planes overhead fueled a hope that rescue might come. He and those who endured alongside him were not disappointed. The Allies did win the war and the prisoners were set free.
But what is the Christian hope that we celebrate this season? From what do we need rescue? The accounts of the suffering of prisoners of war bear stark witness to a reality I would like to deny; I am not a good person. After suffering the misery of being a prisoner in a Russian gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn said “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
Jesus of Nazareth was right when he corrected the young man who called him good: “No one is good but God alone.” The man wanted to justify himself to someone he respected and boasted that he had kept the commandments from his youth onward. Yet he was not willing to do as Jesus instructed; he would not forsake his wealth and become a disciple. His goodness did not extend beyond the convenient.
For myself, all I need is a personal slight for the rage of vengeful fantasy to boil. The seed of wickedness is always there inside me, waiting for an opportunity to germinate, grow to maturity, and bear fruit—all in an instant. Reflecting on Solzhenitsyn, Jordan Peterson has argued that everyone of us would have been Nazi camp guards. We like to think, “I would never have done that,” but it doesn’t take much research to discover that those who did do “that” were not monsters but ordinary people. Under the right circumstances we are all potential Gestapo agents.
“I need hope that my wickedness is not my final identity, and that the troubles of my soul and of this world are not permanent.”
As part of an inner healing program I went through in connection with my church, we were required to record “the secret we planned on taking to the grave.” We had to recall whatever it was we had done that we swore to ourselves we would never tell anyone for the shame. We had to recall “that thing” and confess it out loud to our sponsors. I remember crying heavily as I spoke out loud the thing that I had done, that I had never told anyone and for which I was deeply ashamed. I am no longer bound by that thing; it has been dealt with. But the memory of it bears witness in my soul to my own wickedness. I know I am not a good person.
And so, I am in need of hope.
I need hope that my wickedness is not my final identity, and that the troubles of my soul and of this world are not permanent. I need to know that I have not arrived at my final destination but am just “a passin’ through”. This is where Christian hope becomes the greatest thing in the world, even as it takes a bizarre turn.
I have been reflecting lately on Ephesians 1:7 which says “[God] is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins.”
I don’t have kids. But I have nieces and little friends to play with at church. I wouldn’t sacrifice any of them for anybody. Nope. Just wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. But at Christmas we Christians celebrate the fact that the Almighty, in His unfathomable wisdom and love, sent His son, the second person of the Triune God, down to us. The son took on flesh—he “pitched his tent among us” as John writes in his gospel, for the express purpose of “giving his life for the world” (John 6:33,51).
“What God did is just too big, too audacious, too far outside the realm of my own lived experience.”
Some argue that other religious traditions have similar accounts of a divine being incarnating himself and visiting earth. The Christian account, they say, is simply a borrowing of common mythical elements. The Egyptian god Osiris was said to have died and risen again. Hercules was born of a divine father and mortal mother. Mithras sacrificed himself for world peace. To argue in this context that Christ is the world’s true hope means we need to be certain that our hope is sure and not a fantasy based on an archetypal expression of the collective unconscious.
But a little investigation reveals the supposed parallel accounts are not so parallel after all. Osiris was reassembled after being dismembered by his brother and briefly revived with magic by his wife in order to impregnate her. Zeus had intercourse with a woman, from which union came Hercules – hardly a virgin birth. Mithras killed a dangerous bull which is about as sacrificial as he gets. All these supposed sources have only superficial similarities at best. Rather, we have the New Testament accounts and the church tradition of God becoming man and living among us, so close to his contemporaries that they could “see and hear and touch” him (I John 1:1), not to mention how they witnessed his majesty in his healings and miracles, his crucifixion, and his resurrected glory.
This God did not observe our dire straits with detachment. In grace and kindness, He devised a means of salvation that would satisfy the immutable demand for justice arising from His righteous holiness, as well as His implacable determination to save based on His love and mercy. Not only did he send his own son to demonstrate His character, He also sacrificed Him so as to make Him the Saviour of His enemies.
I find myself ill at ease with these thoughts. What God did is just too big, too audacious, too far outside the realm of my own lived experience, my own all-too-easily-agitated feelings toward those I don’t like. Clearly the God I see in Christ is not like me at all.
And yet, I am so grateful he is not like me. I would have pitched me into outer darkness a long time ago. But it’s in light of Jesus’ incarnation that I realize how much I need God’s kindness and grace—His sending of His son, not just to be like me, a being of flesh and bone, but to credit my sins to His account and to condemn Him to death for them. I question this God while I cling to him, secure in the hope that, though I don’t “get” him, he gets me and has done what he deemed necessary to save me. Truly, God is with us, and that is the greatest hope in the world!