April 3, 2010 | Easter Vigil

Prisoner of Hope

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

On numerous occasions, Desmond Tutu has referred to himself—and other people of faith—as a prisoner of hope. In his most recent book, Made for Goodness, Tutu makes a compelling argument for the essential goodness of humanity, beings created in the very image of a good God. It is goodness, not evil, that is our natural inclination. Deviations from goodness, from minor wrongs to the most heinous evil, are aberrations, not the norm.

In a recent issue of Time magazine, a reader asks Tutu how he can be so optimistic after all the evil, pain, and suffering he has seen and endured in his life. Listen to Tutu’s faithful response: “I’m not optimistic, no. I am a prisoner of hope. In the world, you have very bad people—Hitler, Idi Amin—and they look like they are going to win. All of them—all of them—have bitten the dust.”

He is a prisoner of hope.

To Tutu’s list of evil people, we could add many others. We could also add any number of tragedies that call into question the goodness of our world—perhaps even the goodness of God: a wife and mother faces an incurable illness; an earthquake kills hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti; a high school senior dies in a random accident.

What do we make of these realties? In the face of such pain and suffering, how can we be prisoners of hope? What clever words or ideas can we come up with to put our minds and hearts at ease?

A night like tonight moves us to consider our relationship to God and each other not in terms of theological doctrines or philosophical concepts, but in the way of story. There is a storyline, a trajectory. There is a development of plot and characters. There are tensions and resolutions. There is drama and pathos.

Our story begins in the transformation of darkness and chaos into something good, even something very good. Along the way, that goodness is challenged by the choices and actions of the characters in this story—both God and God’s children. More than once, an individual or a people or the entire world is brought to the very brink of death. And more than once, God shows his children a way other than the way of death, pain, and suffering.

The final scene of the story we have told this evening brings us to a tomb. Before this tomb, there was a subversive parade of palms, confrontations in the temple and on the street, a meal, a lonely garden, a betrayal, a perversion of justice, and a deadly cross.

One way of reading this story is to assume that it was all planned out from the beginning. According to this reading, all the twists and turns and character developments have been anticipated—not just anticipated, but plotted and scripted. Events therefore appear to have purpose and meaning. Everything becomes a necessary piece of a larger, often puzzling but no less sensible narrative.

Another way of reading this story is to assume that it is driven by the dynamics of change and unpredictability, not the machinations of design. Characters make choices—both good and bad—that are their very own. These characters—both human and divine—change and grow. It is never clear whether events happen for a reason or because they simply happen. Meaning is derived from encountering the experience itself, rather than a supposed intentionality behind the scenes. There are more questions than answers. And it may be that the balance between pain and happy endings doesn’t always equal out.

When it comes to Jesus’ death, I tend to favor the second of these reading strategies. For me, Jesus’ death is not so much the central cog of a narrative machine that brings us to salvation. For me, Jesus’ death is a violent aberration of God’s intentions for goodness. It is an act of horror in which human beings choose evil over good and destroy the embodiment of God’s goodness, which wanted only to show us how to embody that goodness ourselves. Jesus’ death—Jesus’ murder—was perhaps an inevitable consequence of his fundamental challenge to the powers that be in his world (and ours). But I don’t believe that it was necessarily scripted from the beginning of this story. I don’t believe that this was the only way the story could have gone.

But this is the way the story does go. And when we arrive at this point of the story, we feel the pain and the horror, because we know it all too well from our own lives. We who live in a world of death and suffering know what it is to look into the abyss and wonder where the goodness is, wonder where God is.

We find goodness—and God—at the entrance to an empty tomb. We find goodness—and God—as we encounter the risen Jesus, alive and well, though forever changed.

This, for me, is the beauty and promise of Easter. There is nothing—not a single thing, person, or event—that is beyond the redemptive power of God’s goodness and love. Disobedient children are cared for. A murderous world is preserved. An oppressed people are freed from captivity. A devastated and brutalized people are restored. The destruction of goodness and love is redeemed.

There is nothing—not a single thing, person, or event—that is beyond the redemptive power of God’s goodness and love.

Here, friends, is our hope.

Even in this world of evil, pain, and suffering, may we live as prisoners of hope.

Amen.