Why Have Hope?

We Are Wholes Not Souls

I love the pastel colors of Easter. The bunnies are cute too. On a recent play date with my granddaughter, we went out for ice cream. When she saw the gigantic pastel bunny outside the shop, she ran with abandon to lavish hugs and kisses on it. Daffodils, lilies, eggs, baskets, grass, candy, dresses, hats, hams, and hope are springing up everywhere. The pastels paste over what Anne Lamott calls “the cold dark place within, the water under the frozen lake or the secluded, camouflaged hole” (198). The human race had to look into the hole of death too often and too long during the past pandemic year. We need an about-face in a new direction. But still, standing by the hole was important, even good. Why?

The hole is a portal to hope. I have a friend whose nonagenarian father is facing a cancer recurrence. He is afraid and doesn’t want to die. He can’t find peace, and he fears his faith isn’t strong enough. Raised to believe that faith meant complete certainty without doubt, he carries an impossible standard as a measurement against which he falls short. And yet, he has lived a faithful, honorable life. The need for certainty has rusted the hinges of the door to hope and made it stick. He can’t just force it open; he needs to change his belief about faith.

Faith is having confidence in the trustworthiness of a person or belief. Trustworthiness comes from evidence, not absolute certainty. Evidence builds probability, not proof. What unsticks the hinges to the door to faith? Probability. Faith is not something you talk yourself into, and it’s much more than sincerity because it’s possible to be sincerely wrong, like some mothers of contestants on American Idol. More important than the sincerity of one’s faith is the object of one’s faith. Is the person or belief sound and true or is it what we wish to be sound and true? That’s a key question to ask.

That leads us back to Easter pastels and other enjoyments. Do we have reason for hope in the face of the camouflaged hole? Both times I was diagnosed with cancer, I felt disjointed. I have my consciousness, that awareness within me since birth. I have my personality, my way in the world that grows but never fundamentally changes. Creativity, passions, sensitivity, and those stirrings in my heart for the transcendent bestow meaning and purpose. All of these qualities that set me apart from the animals seem eternal. How can consciousness just be annihilated? Dirt, decay, and grave will take the body. What takes the soul? Does it last?

I keep coming back to the resurrection of Jesus to give me confidence to walk toward the hole. My first reaction to cancer in 2002 and 2019 was to reengage the study of the resurrection begun in seminary years before. What are the arguments in favor of it? Against it? My studies revealed the preponderance of evidence for it. What else explains the fact that Jesus’s body was not found despite overwhelming incentives to produce it among those who didn’t believe it happened? The presence of Roman Praetorian guards at Joseph’s tomb insured the body wouldn’t be stolen. What else explains the accounts of women being the first witnesses in a misogynist culture? If you made up the story, you wouldn’t entrust it to women, who were not even allowed to witness in a court of law, much less have their voices heard elsewhere. Is there a better explanation for Jesus’s appearance to 500 people at different times and under different circumstances? Certainly, mass hallucinations are implausible. Is there another cogent explanation for why the early followers of Jesus stopped sheltering in their homes and took to the streets with surprising courage and success despite being persecuted? Peter’s sermon in Jerusalem at Pentecost resulted in 3000 converts with more to follow.

What else explains Paul’s complete about-face from persecutor to founder of the Church or the emergence of the early church and the martyrdom of many in the first two millennia of persecutions? Certainly, that many people don’t die for what they know to be a lie. These considerations, among others,* balance the scales in favor of the probability that the resurrection actually happened.

Probability more than absolute proof provides a solid basis for taking a confident step of faith. Confidence guides us away from the unsustainable extremes of blind faith and disbelief. It’s like the WD-40 that unsticks the door hinges enabling steps—not blind leaps—of faith. There is, of course, more to faith than making a probable case, but it forms the logos of the case for faith, which sustains us through times of questioning and doubt.

But what does the resurrection mean for me, for us? N.T. Wright points out that throughout history “[f]rom Plato to Hegel and beyond, some of the greatest philosophers declared that what you think about death, and life beyond it, is the key to thinking seriously about everything else” (6). From the earliest times—the belief in the resurrection wasn’t something added later on—the church believed that Jesus’s physical resurrection was the basis for the hope of receiving resurrection bodies. This is contrary to the Platonic idea of a disembodied soul that many still hold today. Wright explains that the early church saw “heavenly life as a temporary stage on the way to the eventual resurrection of the body” (41), a sort of “temporary lodging” as a “prelude to the resurrection itself.” Christians “realize that they are saved not as souls but as wholes and not for themselves alone but for what God now longs to do through them” (200). Shalom—wholeness—is to be a way of life.

In Jesus’s resurrection, there is a coming together of heaven and earth, “the belief that that future has already begun to come forward to meet us in the present” (122). The continuity between our present and future leads to redeeming the present. It is a bedrock foundation that gives hope and motivation to change the world. It’s what motivates William Wilberforce to spend twenty years of his life—including his finances and health—to end slavery in Britain. The resurrection helps us “dance around the rim of the abyss, holler into it, measure it, throw rocks in it, and still not fall in. It can no longer swallow us up. And we can get on with things” (Lamott, 198). The resurrection offers a peace of mind in the face of the hole. We are not just souls; we are wholes, confident wholes who can get on with things.

It makes the celebration of pastels and bunnies with my granddaughter that much sweeter. Happy Easter!

*There are many books on the topic of the historical reliability of the resurrection that offer additional evidence. A new one is Hope in Times of Fear by Timothy Keller who wrote it during his current treatment for pancreatic cancer.

Sources Cited:

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. Anchor Books, 1994.

Wright, N. T. Surprised by Hope. HarperCollins, 2008.