Quotes About Hope

Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are but also to the way things will be, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of G-D as the waters cover the sea. That remains a surprising hope, and perhaps it will be the artists who are best at conveying both the hope and the surprise.

Jesus died for our sins not so that we could sort out abstract ideas, but so that we, having been put right, could become part of God's plan to put his whole world right. That is how the revolution works.

If you believe in resurrection, you believe that the living God will put his world to rights and that if God wants to do that in the future, it is right to try to anticipate that by whatever means in the present.

Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that a different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word.

I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God's own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us ans new possibilities to our lives. That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about

resurrection doesn't mean escaping from the world; it means mission to the world based on Jesus's lordship over the world.

What good news regularly does, then, is to put a new event into an old story, point to a wonderful future hitherto out of reach, and so introduce a new period in which, instead of living a hopeless life, people are now waiting with excitement for what they know is on the way.

So instead of suggesting that we could escape the earth to go to heaven, Jesus's good news was about heaven coming to earth.

Conspiracy theories were thriving in the first century, just as they are today. Jesus pushes them aside. Stay calm, he says, and trust in me.

The only reason the death of Jesus was ever thought of as good news was because of what happened next.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

Jesus wasn't just a great character, a hero figure for subsequent generations to look up to. He was announcing good news—something that was happening and has now happened, something that changes the world. And either he was right or he was wrong.

Because the early Christians believed that resurrection had begun with Jesus and would be completed in the great final resurrection on the last day, they believed that God had called them to work with him, in the power of the Spirit, to implement the achievement of Jesus and thereby to anticipate the final resurrection, in personal and political life, in mission and holiness.

Death is the last weapon of the tyrant; the point of the resurrection, despite much misunderstanding, is that death has been defeated.

The New Testament picks up from the Old the theme that God intends, in the end, to put the whole creation to rights.

But the failure of Christianity is a modern myth, and we shouldn't be ashamed of telling the proper story of church history, which of course has plenty of muddle and wickedness, but also far more than we normally imagine of love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope. To

Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato's safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it's in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.

It is not about "life after death" as such. Rather, it's a way of talking about being bodily alive again after a period of being bodily dead. Resurrection is a second-stage postmortem life: "life after 'life after death.

Being saved' doesn't just mean, as it does for many today, 'going to heaven when they die'. It means 'knowing God's rescuing power, the power revealed in Jesus, which anticipates, in the present, God's final great act of deliverance'.

Now love doesn't stop at death - or if it does, it's a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and feeling the pain of nothingness. But there is no reason at all why love should discontinue the practice of holding the beloved in prayer before God.

Paul believed, in fact, that Jesus had gone through death and out the other side. Jesus had gone into a new mode of physicality, for which there was no precedent and of which there was, as yet, no other example.

But the voice goes on, calling us, beckoning us, luring us to think that there might be such a thing as justice, as the world being put to rights, even though we find it so elusive.

Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn't. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him—but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction.

The question for us, as we learn again and again the lessons of hope for ourselves, is how we can be for the world what Jesus was for Thomas: how we can show to the world the signs of love, how we can reach out our hands in love, wounded though they will be if the love has been true, how we can invite those whose hearts have grown shrunken and shriveled with sorrow and disbelief to come and see what love has done, what love is doing, in our communities, our neighborhoods: