Today we still celebrate and live out the hope expressed by the communities who wrote and compiled the Scriptures.
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.
Hebrews 1:1-2
The source of our hope as disciples of Jesus is ancient going back over 3,000 years ago. So to begin, we’ll focus on just a few people and events from these Scriptures that slowly and surely prepare us for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Moses and the revealing of God’s Name
In the Scriptures hope arises out of an encounter with the living God and the revealing of God’s name. The foundational experience is the encounter of Moses with God in Exodus 3. This elusive Hebrew name for God can mean “I am who I am, I will be who I will be, I will be where I will be”. Through this encounter and what follows Moses is freed from the old order – the fixed religion with fixed gods in the fixed society of Pharaoh and Egypt. Out of this encounter comes the creation of a liberated people called into existence by this free, living God. This God chooses to come alongside the powerless in compassion and gives them hope in a different way of life. Here hope is the fruit of a divine initiative which opens up a new and unexpected future. One result is an alternative perspective and lifestyle capable of critiquing and even dismantling the dominant consciousness of the age. The hope that emerges is capable of energising individuals and communities, promising an alternative vision and reality towards which they can work, worship and flourish.
The absolute claims and myths of Pharaoh’s empire are now blown away by the single revelation of the freeGod. The Egyptian gods legitimated an ordered society, the order of the Pharaohs. They kept things as they were. There those who have, are protected at the expense of those who have not. But the plagues show up the weakness of the gods and the priesthood of Egypt, they show up the lack of power underpinning the politics of oppression of the Empire, which had now failed to control its nobodies – the Hebrew slaves.
So Moses the prophet proposes a religion of God’s freedom. It is this which underpins a politics of justice and compassion as an alternative to the politics of oppression and the status quo. Moses offers hope for the fractured Hebrew community at a time where there was no hope. But to act in hope is always a risk because the future is still yet to be whereas servitude offers familiar stability. Again and again, we see the Israelites return to slavery because they cannot see or trust in the hope that is to come (Genesis 5:8 and 15). Instead, they settle for an uneasy adaptation and accommodation.
Exodus and a new journey
After the Exodus experience and the establishing of a new kingdom the people look backwards to identify this hope-giving God at work in the past. They remember the lives of their ancestors Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Jacob and retell their lives through the perspective of God’s gift of hope. Abraham had made a break with the past by travelling to new territories with an unknown outcome. He journeyed in hope and faith and his journey became a sign of hope for many other journeys embarked on throughout the Scriptures.
At the heart of these stories is a divine promise that is open ended – gradually being fulfilled by God’s gift through an unexpected birth of an heir, of a name, of a new country and a blessed community among the Nations. In the blessing of the priest king Melchizedek in Genesis 14:19-20 “Blessed be Abram by God most high, maker of heaven and earth; and blest be God most high who has delivered your enemies into your hand” we see how it is an outsider Melchisedek, the priest king of Salem who is the first to recognise what is happening. God’s promise is that “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12). This draws Abram and Sara out from the civilised comfort of Ur on a journey to a promised but unidentified Land in the hope of an unknown God. It is this living memory of a God who could promise a new birth to an aging couple that kept hope alive. The spiritual descendants of the newly named and blessed Abraham and Sarah will continue to trust in this promise, and in the worst of times continue to act out of its universal hope.
Remember Jesus’ retort to the Pharisees and Sadducees in Matthew 3:7ff “You brood of vipers… Do not presume to say to yourselves “We have Abraham as our ancestor” for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham!” This was as radical a re-reading of the original divine promise and hope as Jesus could have spoken. As at Exodus, so in his teaching and practice, the future is blown open to new hope in the same living and dynamic God.
A new living hope: prophets and kings
Across the centuries the people of God will continue to look backwards and forwards from the hope and liberation of Exodus. Initially, this is expressed as a collective hope. There was no expectation of a single anointed messiah, in the early biblical times. Saul and David were to be anointed kings over Israel and with the establishment of a monarchy and then later, the building of the Temple in Solomon’s reign, the hopes of the nation might seem to have been realised. But this golden age of kingship proved to be short lived – the kingdom split in two, neighbouring invaders oppressed the people economically and religiously. Hope is once more invoked for a future without war and where everyone could flourish within the true religion of God. Gradually these hopes become focused and located in a messiah, a ruler from the house of David, who would unite the nation and bring peace, prosperity and justice.
From the 8th to 6th centuries BCE the prophets will recite poems of promise, hope and trust, in which the present ordering of life will be renewed by God’s will. God’s dream which becomes Israel’s hope is the “establishment of a new social order, which will embody peace, justice, freedom, equity, and well-being.” (Brueggemann, Hope within History, p.75).
Prophets and the memory of hope
It is the prophets who model the critical memory of hope in the Old Testament. Jeremiah first addresses God as “O you hope of Israel, its saviour in time of trouble…“ (Jeremiah 14:8). While God is often described as righteous and merciful, a giver of law, the idea of God’s covenant promise as giver of hope takes precedence over the law. It ensures that hope is at the centre of the whole biblical revelation and of the history of salvation.
Isaiah 55:1-5 is written in 6th century exile when the people were totally controlled by Babylon, whose politics are outlined in Isaiah 46, and its religion in Isaiah 47. But the Prophet gives a poetic, imaginary message of hope of a different future based on the people’s past.
“Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
and he who has no money, come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labour for that which does not satisfy?
Isaiah 55:1-2
The prophet remembers the manna of God, given to destitute ex-slaves in Exodus 16. Given to all so there was no hunger. In this poetry Isaiah gives back to his oppressed people their freedom to imagine and hope. To help them think outside the Babylonian definition of reality and to imagine a different future.
By Isaiah 65:17-25 the people have returned from exile. Now they are oppressed by the priesthood of the time who control access to the Temple and therefore, to God. Groups who couldn’t follow all the rules and regulations of priestly religion were being marginalised. Isaiah addresses these and promises a new heaven and new earth in a radical act of hope. The poem opens their minds and hearts to see and think differently and so to act differently beyond the present. It gives the hopeless new hope.
Jesus echoes this in his conversation with the Samaritan Woman at the well in John 4. “Woman believe me the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
