They Killed My Hope

(Easter Monologue)

Rev. Chris Harbin, Rocks Baptist Church—Pamplin, VA

11 April 2004

They killed him. I guess it is more like they killed me. You see, when He died on the cross, all of my hopes, dreams, and understanding of life and God and faith died with Him. It wasn’t just my hopes and dreams, but the hopes and dreams of all the disciples!

Oh, we knew better. We knew that there was much more to life and the gospel that Jesus had preached. We knew that He had told us the He would die. It just didn’t make any sense. Then again, that was a good part of why Jesus had to die, anyway.

I guess if this is going to make any sense to you, I might as well back up and start closer to the beginning. I wrote the story of Jesus’ good news, but maybe you haven’t read it. All right, here goes.

A couple of years before they killed Him, I had been hearing about this strange prophet roaming the countryside. He talked about God’s rule in a way that just struck us as odd. We knew He couldn’t be serious about it, but He kept on about how God wanted more direct contact with people, especially the scum of society, so it seemed. Jesus went around in the synagogues, but also in the countryside, healing those with various ailments, deformities, and serious problems.

The healings were one thing, but the message was another. If it weren’t for the miracles, many of us might have just brushed Him off as some eccentric lunatic. But once you began listening, it just seemed like it was the world that was crazy and He was the only sane one around!

He talked about love and how God loved everyone, even the folks we couldn’t stand. He taught about worshipping God in wholeness and sincerity of heart, rather than following the proscribed legalistic forms of the day. He preached about a God of grace and mercy, when all we knew was a God of harsh justice. His preaching went against the flow of the standard interpretations of the Law. It set many people on edge. It made them uncomfortable and exposed the shallow foundation on which they built their lives.

They killed him to protect their understanding of reality, God, truth, and the comfort of the status quo. They killed our hopes, our yearning for intimacy with God, our burning desire for life to have greater meaning than that of stale, proscribed religiosity. They cast our lives into a tailspin of despair, dread, fear, and gross uncertainty. We scattered from following Him as He was arrested, tried, beaten, forced down the Via Dolorosa, and nailed to the cross.

I can still see our hope melting into despair as Jesus trudged along on the way to Golgotha. We wanted to protest. We wanted to rise up and fight to protect Jesus, even as Peter had tried to do in Gethsemane. We didn’t want to let them kill Jesus, for all of our hopes and dreams depended upon Jesus being alive! If Jesus were to die, our hopes would be destroyed and our lives would revert to meaningless actions with no future, hope, or direction.

We wanted desperately to stop them, but Jesus would have none of it. As strange and harsh as it seemed to us at the time, Jesus wanted our dreams and hopes to melt away. He wanted our understanding of faith and God and life to be destroyed once and for all, because He had something more to offer.

As long as Jesus was alive, we could still cling to our ideas of an earthly Messiah who would wage war on Rome, declare Jewish independence, grant us wealth, prominence, and political power. He didn’t want us to live with those hopes and dreams. He didn’t want anyone to reduce Him to a worker of miracles and the means of a free ride. He wanted us to grasp His idea of hope, peace, and love.

You see, we were still living under a delusion that we could add Jesus’ teaching to the way we knew things to be. We were taking in His words, but we were twisting them into our own view of what life was all about. Those dreams had to be nailed to the cross. It was really the only way for us to confront with finality the inadequacy of what we wanted out of Jesus. He refused to be just an addition to be tacked on to an existing structure. We needed to accept Him for what He declared Himself to be, not for what we wanted out of Him.

Earlier I said that they killed Him. That’s not really true. Strange as it may seem, it was what He wanted to happen all along. He wanted them to pin our hopes and understandings and dreams to the cross so that we might finally accept His message on its own right. He wanted our perspective shattered so that we might finally see that God truly is love and grace and mercy. You see, Jesus was more than a miracle worker. Jesus was more than a great teacher and prophet. He was more than a light in the darkness of stale religious expression.

Jesus is very God in human flesh, come into our midst that we might catch a glimpse of the reality and length of God’s love. Our hopes and dreams stayed on the cross and went no further. Jesus did not. Our concepts of God as vengeful, wrathful, and angry could not make it beyond the cross. Our failure to look beyond the realities of politics, wealth, and material issues were shown up as God allowed Himself to be nailed to the cross.

He didn’t stay there. They took Jesus’ body to a tomb, but He didn’t stay there! You just can’t make Jesus act and be the way you want Him to. That’s part of the message that you are celebrating today! He didn’t stay there, nor can we.

When Jesus rose from the grave, he not only shattered our understanding of life, reality, and God. He forced us to take a new look at the meaning of His words and His life. He forced us to see that God really is interested in everyone. God really does love us, even the outcasts among our lot. God is not angry with humanity and seeking ways to wreak justice in retaliation. God seeks us out in love to call us to Himself.

Oh, he damaged my understanding of life and reality pretty severely. He gave me so much more in its stead! Now that my pet ideas are hanging on the cross, I can see Him more clearly. He is alive, and He loves us! God calls us into His very presence—it is an invitation to a new life with Him! Won’t you let Him be who He is? I look back on the cross in a whole new way now. For me, it is a symbol for beginning to see Jesus as He truly is. Come take a look with me! They killed my hope, but Jesus gave me His!

—©2004 Christopher B. Harbin

This sermon in pdf