Hope

In the church calendar, this week is Holy Week – the time leading up to Easter Sunday.  It is marked by Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, before culminating in Easter on Sunday morning.

On Easter Sunday, we Christians will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  Among other things, this is a celebration of hope: hope that in Jesus, God has claimed victory over sin and death; hope that God is bringing new creation to a broken world; hope that we, as followers of Jesus, can share in God’s resurrection life.

One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption, about life in a New England prison called “Shawshank” from the 1940s to the 1960s.  The two main characters are Andy and Red, both inmates who become friends while serving their sentence.  Andy is young and idealistic, and he holds onto hope with great passion.  He tells Red that “hope is good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”  Red, however, is a seasoned inmate who has long given up hope.  “Let me tell you something,” he cautions Andy.  “Hope is a dangerous thing.  Hope can drive a man insane.”

After much struggle, Andy gets out of Shawshank and tries to begin his life anew.  Red is left with a gap in his friendship, and he begins to reconsider Andy’s perspective on hope.  Towards the end of the movie, Red, too, is released from prison.  So he hops on a bus to find Andy.  He says this:

“I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain. I hope I can make it across the border. I hope to see my friend and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

I wonder: how does hope form our lives?  Are we often like Red in The Shawshank Redemption, calloused and fatalistic and skeptical of too much talk of “hope”?  Or are we like Andy, clinging to hope in the midst of seemingly hopeless situations?  As we move toward Easter, may we find ways to embrace and proclaim hope, that we might find ourselves in the words of the old hymn: My hope is built on nothing less / Than Jesus Christ, my righteousness.