Cultivating Hope

I am an insufferable optimist. It can be quite vexing to people around me. Whether predicting how much time something will take, what something will cost, or how many people we’ll be able to fit in our living room, my optimistic estimates usually outstrip reality.

But optimism is not the same as hope. Optimism is more like wishful thinking; like the Brewers winning the World Series. But hope has more substance, at least from a Biblical perspective.

The word for hope in Hebrew (qavah) has a sense of waiting with patient expectation. It is sometimes translated rope – an object that can hold tension. One beautiful picture of qavah from a symbolic perspective is the scarlet rope that Rahab hung out her window in the book of Joshua. She was a Jericho sex worker who hid Hebrew spies. They instructed Rahab to hang a scarlet rope out of her window so the invaders would know to keep anyone in that home safe.

I love the thought of this woman waiting in hopeful expectation for deliverance as the walls of her world literally come crashing down around her. Especially poignant when you recognize that this hopeful, pagan sex-worker ends up in the lineage of Jesus, the long-awaited one and the Hope of the world.

The Greek word for hope has a similar tenor of waiting expectantly. The hoper can wait in hopeful expectation because of the character of the one in whom their hope is placed (unlike the Brewers).

In Matthew 12 the Pharisees are dogging Jesus about his Sabbath violations. After he heals a man and calls people to keep quiet about it, Matthew connects Jesus to the person described in Isaiah 42:

I will put my Spirit on him, and he will proclaim justice to the nations.
He will not quarrel or cry out; no one will hear his voice in the streets.
A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out,
till he has brought justice through to victory. In his name the nations will put their hope.” (Matt. 12:18-21, Is. 42:1-4)

Biblical hope, in this passage, is patient expectation in the face of injustice. For Isaiah it was cultivating hope during captivity in Babylon and in Mathew’s day it was under the boot of the Roman Empire. This hope for justice was not only fir Israel but for the nations. For Babylon and for Rome. Even when there were signs of justice.

And our hope for justice isn’t true hope unless it is obscured by unjust circumstances around us. Or as Paul puts it to the Romans “Hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” (Romans 8:24). 

I’ll go further in saying that a Biblical hope for justice is not simply a hope that this will come about in some other realm after we’re dead. It holds an expectation that we “will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13). We wait and we work for it with expectation. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness” (or justice as many non-English translations put it) Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:33.

The book of Psalms has the most references to hope, but do you know what Biblical book has the second most references? Job! A book wrestling with the existential question of evil. Hope and hopelessness are locked in a battle throughout the book, and not all the references to hope are positive.  But the punchline and conclusion of the battle for home is: “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him”

I train myself to wait in patient expectation to see greater and greater measures of God’s Shalom in my lifetime. I strive for God’s kingdom and its justice (Matt. 6:33), and I do so without knowing exactly what it will look like, I only know it doesn’t look like what I see now – 400,000 new COVID infections per day in India as health care facilities collapse under the strain. A friend from a Chinese minority group has been sentenced to more than a dozen years in prison after spending years in a concentration camp. We live in a country that suffers under pernicious forms of racism and in an era where the earth is groaning under human exploitation and devastation.

Yet I wait and I work with hopeful expectation.

This doesn’t mean we don’t experience pain and grief. But it’s a different kind of grief than those who don’t know God’s love and justice. “We do not grieve as others who have no hope,” I Thes. 4:13

So, take stock of your hoper. What condition is it in? How much hope do you have to see the goodness of God in the land of the living? I challenge you to anchor your confidence in God’s love and justice while keeping an open hand as to when and how this might happen.

Let us wait for God’s justice, work for God’s justice even as we wail at the broken shalom around us.

“But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love,” Ps. 33:18.

“Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord.” Ps. 31:24