“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:24-25)
“We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered,” (Hebrews 6:19–20)
I’m reminded of the countless Christmas-morning scenes in which all the overfunctioning spouses who’ve taken on the responsibility of Christmas shopping for the whole family—themselves included—claps their hands with delight at the sight of a perfectly-wrapped box among the presents they’d wrapped the night before, exclaiming with anticipation: “Ooh, I hope it’s that new novel I’ve been waiting for!”
When you bought the presents yourself, this can only be play-acting or amnesia.
Hope isn’t hope, after all, if hope has been seen. And yet this means that hope comes with an element of paradox. It is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” the thing that keeps us steady in the stormy seas of our lives, and yet it is and must remain unseen. The Christian hope—that God has redeemed us and will save us from our own fragility and death, that the end of our lives in this world is not the end of the stories of our lives, that we will one day rise again and see God and one another face to face—will always be for us a kind of certain uncertainty, or maybe an uncertain certainty.
If we somehow really knew that it was true, if we had irrefutable evidence that our hope would be fulfilled, our hope would not be hope. It would be something more like the anticipation of opening a gift you wrapped for yourself. But we do not know: we hope. Our struggles and our doubts and our uncertainties are to be expected, because our hope has not been seen, and it’s an incredible hope.
But anchors are rarely seen, at least by most of us. Unless you are the sailor who threw it overboard, you have no reason to be certain there’s an anchor there at all. It could just be a length of rope, trailing down into the water, leaving you adrift. And yet you trust that the anchor is there. And even better yet, the anchor works, even if you doubt it’s there at all, because its effect is governed by the laws of physics, and not by your belief in the laws of physics.
The hope that anchors your soul is not your hope, after all. It is God’s gift in Christ, who was born as a human being, who plunged down into the depths of our world, experienced every facet of human experience, and tied God to our fate forever. And it’s Christ’s hope for you, not your hope for yourself, that is healing and redeeming and saving you day by day.
May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in
believing through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Romans 15:13