He Lives to Give Us Hope
To have no hope is a sad, devastating thing, isn’t it? You’ve felt it, maybe. Maybe more than a time or two.
That college course, that professor…it’s not that it’s just not looking good there is no hope of salvaging this class.
You’ve had to stand by for so long for someone to hire you. Application after application and you’re right there, teetering on the edge of hopelessness.
You wait and you wait and you wait, but that special someone doesn’t seem to be coming your way. You’re starting to truly believe it will never happen. You’ve talked and talked but they just don’t listen. Nothing ever changes. Why bother trying anymore?
There are so many of these kinds of things we could mention, but I’ll offer just one more. Have you ever felt hopeless after someone you cared about died? Not just helpless. I mean hopeless. You had invested so much love and time in your spouse, been so excited to have that child, never had a closer friend, and then…they are gone. Devastating. The weight of hopelessness is this heavy, dark blanket dropped down over you.
We’re not the first people to experience the sadness that comes from lost hope. This has been the way all along since the Garden of Eden. Sin causes it, and you can catch some people in the Bible expressing lost hope. I think of Elijah, the prophet who truly believed that he was the last one serving the Lord and he wanted to die. Or Sarah, who was well beyond the age of having children and didn’t believe God’s promise to give her with a son. It was so hopeless that even the thought of it was laughable to her.
Then there are these Easter-afternoon men. You heard it in their voices as they walked away from Jerusalem, right? This was not a happy walk. Can you picture them Cleopas and his friend? Eyes mostly on the dirt in front of them with the occasional glance at each other at particularly difficult thoughts or unanswerable questions. Talking, trying to figure out what went wrong, remembering things Jesus said, wondering what they missed—all while replaying the sight of Jesus’ bloodied face and body nailed to a cross, hanging above the soldiers and spectators. How could that have happened? He was supposed to save them and the rest of God’s people.
Hope had disappeared. They said it: But we were hoping that he was going to redeem Israel. Not only that, but besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. “We were hoping.” Not anymore. What they thought he was and what he would do was now impossible. The situation was officially hopeless. Three-days-dead pretty much sealed the deal. No reason to stick around Jerusalem.
But the beautiful truth of Easter is that Jesus comes to people who are lost and in despair…and he gives them hope.
While those hopeless men were trying to process everything that had happened, a man comes up and walks alongside them. It’s not the fading sunlight that kept them from knowing who he was, their eyes were kept from recognizing him. Jesus did this on purpose.
If you’ve ever been talking with a few people out in the courtyard after church or sitting around at home with family or friends and someone starts talking about some huge news—tornadoes that took out several towns in the Midwest, that someone you know had a baby 3 weeks ago, something everyone’s talking about there’s often that one person who says, “Wait…what happened?” And you all just stare at them in disbelief like, How do you not know this?!
Do you hear the How do you not know this?! in Cleopas’ voice? “Are you the only visitor in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” Then, to the one person who fully knows what happened and why, they explain. Jesus of Nazareth… a prophet… powerful in deed and word… the chief priests and our rulers handed him over…condemned to death…they crucified him… Does your heart ache for them when you hear this? But we were hoping that he was going to redeem Israel. That might be one of the saddest things said by a person in the Bible. They didn’t know what to do. The person they had staked their hope and future on was dead. They were lost. The reports of the women and a couple disciples that the grave was empty wasn’t enough There was no body, and they had not heard any reports of him being alive.
They talk about lost hope but when they give the reason why, they use a certain word that reveals why they thought he had come: redeem. Redeem means to pay a price to set someone free. Think paying a ransom or buying a slave’s freedom. The dynamic, powerful Jesus they likely thought had come to win God’s people freedom from Roman rule and maybe to pay the price for sin as well. It’s one thing to have hopes dashed when it comes to everyday kinds of things, it’s another when your country needs rescue and your hopes for physical and spiritual things are tied together.
Part of their hopelessness seems to have come from looking at Jesus for the wrong thing. We see that in the way Jesus scolded them. Looking for a national Savior for Israel was not seeing Jesus for who the prophets said he would be…and what would happen to him…and what that would mean.
We may not like to hear it, but we’re sometimes guilty of the same kind of thing. We focus on what Jesus can do for us here in this world. We can build expectations of Jesus that he never promised to us. “If God loves me, then I shouldn’t suffer.” “If Jesus loves me, then things should go well.” “If I’m living for God, then things should work out.” Even if we don’t exactly say it like that, we have created some expectations of God, and when they aren’t met, our hope fades.
We don’t necessarily stop trusting in Jesus although some do but we may start doubting whether he is really active in our lives or cares about doing the things that we think are important. To put it crassly, we’re very interested in the things we want to go our way, and we can get pretty disappointed and even lose hope when they don’t. We had hoped for better things from God. When we misunderstand Jesus, our hope dies like it did with Cleopas and his friend.
But you know, Jesus can restore our hope. You heard him do it for those two men. He can do it for us too. “How foolish you are and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and to enter his glory?” Not great to be on the receiving end of that, huh? Foolish meant that they lacked spiritual understanding. God sometimes talks that way in the Bible the wise person is the one with faith, the fool is the one who doesn’t know and believe what God says. And that’s exactly these men. If they had trusted the prophets, they would have absolutely understood the sufferings and death of Jesus. Just listening to the prophet Isaiah would have been enough for that!
Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself. Maybe you’ve experienced something like this: We used to play out in the yard and sometimes things didn’t go the way they were supposed to. So, maybe it was wiffle ball. We hit the ball and before one of us could get to it, the dog sprints in, grabs it in his mouth and takes off. The batter might like that to be a home run he’ll circle the bases because no one is getting that dog! You know what the pitcher wants though. A do-over. That’s what these two disciples needed. A biblical do-over. Moses is the one who wrote the first five books of the Bible, so Jesus really started from the beginning for them!
It’s worth considering where we fall on the Wise-Foolish Scale. We may be a little—or a lot like these Emmaus disciples. They should have known what the Scriptures were saying. They didn’t, and Jesus responded with his “law voice.” Not understanding, feeling hopeless when there was no reason to feel hopeless, was sinful. It’s possible that we should be repenting too and showing repentance by listening more to God.
Did you know that there are still empty chairs in our Bible studies here? It’s true! What a great place to show repentance and grow in our understanding and ward off hopelessness! We even offer Grow in Grace classes where we start from the very beginning of everything in the Bible (like Jesus did) and go on from there.
I think Cleopas and his friend should have spent more time in Bible class! Maybe you should think about doing that, if you haven’t. Your pastors are not the perfect teachers that Jesus was for those men, but God has trained us and called us to help you understand. We want to do that for you. We want you to be filled with hope through everyday things and filled with hope for heaven. And don’t worry, we’re not going to do things like put you on the spot or make you read out loud or anything else that might embarrass you or make you uncomfortable!
You know, if you read your Bible more faithfully and sit in on some Bible studies, there can be some dramatic effects. Did you catch what happened after their brief, but powerful and comprehensive theological training? They didn’t want him to leave! “Stay with us.”
Can you imagine what it was like at the dinner table? I’m pretty sure I accidently had lunch with Britney Spears in Las Vegas a bunch of years ago when I was at District Mission Board meetings. Off in the corner, a bodyguard, a baseball cap pulled down low, a look that showed that she’d been recognized even though she was trying not to be It was a little surprising. Not exactly the same, I guess (!) but at that Emmaus dinner table, there was something different about this teacher, though not quite recognizable. And when they realized it was their risen Lord? “Were not our hearts burning within us while he was speaking to us along the road and while he was explaining the Scriptures to us?”
Then they got up immediately and went back the 7 miles that they had just come maybe even in the dark by the time they got there! Why? Because they were excited! They understood! The resurrection of Jesus made a difference! They needed to tell their friends his friends who also now knew!
I don’t know if you’re heart will burn within you as you understand your Savior better, but what will come is an increased love and awe for your Savior. And with that comes this confident hope in your life—the kind that gets you through the rough days that could otherwise drain the hope from your heart. The kind of hope that has you looking forward to heaven. Jesus restores our hope through his Word just like he did for those men.
You know where you won’t get blessings like that? From trusting your feelings. From looking deep inside yourself. From your circumstances. From your emotions. Hope comes from God’s Word. He promised Jesus would come and he did. He promises that his life and death paid for your sins. He promises that his Easter resurrection guarantees eternal life for you. There’s only one way to know that stuff, and it’s by hearing God’s Word and then maintaining hope by hearing it regularly and understanding it better.
Early in the day it was, “We had hoped…” By evening it was, “The Lord really has been raised.” You tell me, does Easter make a difference? You know it does. In those moments of weak faith and waning hope, your risen Lord comes to you too. He speaks to you in his Word and he comes to you in the Lord’s Supper. It’s there that you find forgiveness and life and, yes, hope. Because he lives. Amen.
Now the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.