Hopecasting

Imagine you are one of the twelve disciples, which is for all of us a bit of a stretch and if it isn’t … well, let’s move on. Imagine now that you are in Jerusalem that last week, that you had Passover with Jesus (before everyone doctored it into words like “communion” and “mass”), and now imagine you saw the guards come in the garden, and that you watched (near Peter, in fact) from a distance at what they were doing to Jesus. Now imagine standing well out of sight when Jesus was crucified. Now imagine thinking about all you had hoped for, all you have planned, and you had dreamed – and dreamed and dreamed – about the kingdom Jesus so often announced and illustrated and embodied.

Boom. In one day it was all over. Your hopes were wrecked and you wondered what you do with your life. You sensed the desert and exile. Can you return to Galilee and fish? How could you ever go to synagogue again and listen to the rabbis after you had walked with Jesus and heard such brilliance and insight and spiritual reformation? Standing there in Jerusalem you may well have decided to chuck it all. If they did that to Jesus, what difference does it make.

Now imagine that after Sunday morning you heard this impossible story that Jesus was not in the tomb, that a few women and other disciples had actually encountered Jesus.

Now imagine this: When no one was looking you wander over to the tomb of Jesus, and look inside and then you enter. He really is gone. You stand there and a fresh wind of something altogether new fills the tomb, and your eyes fill with tears, and you begin to recall those miracles of Jesus, the bread and the baskets, and the time he told the waves to knock it off and they listened! Then you remember all his teachings, those astounding teachings on the hills around Capernaum, his parables … and you take a seat in the tomb and the wind gets stronger.

You begin to hope. No, you hope.

Now you are standing in the empty tomb facing the City, looking over the City up to Galilee, and the wind suddenly gets stronger – you hope the world will hear about Jesus. Standing there in the empty tomb looking out you suddenly realized the world and history have changed. God has done something never done before: God has sent his Son into the enemy camp, the enemy exiled the Son but the Son reversed the exile, he crossed the river of death in the resurrection, and new creation entered into history.

Hope becomes your innermost infection. Hope becomes the way to live, not just hope for the afterlife but hope in the here and now because the stone was rolled away in front of that tomb and you’ve tasted that empty tomb.

Reading this wonderfully encouraging, biblically shaped but genuinely honest reflection on Marko’s own exile and rediscovery of a deeper hope led me to the above reflections and to the words of America’s pastor of pastors, Eugene Peterson’s, golden expression “practicing resurrection.” Hopecasting takes us through the joy of holy week, into the exile of darkness and hopelessness, and into the empty tomb of hope. In this book Marko teaches each of us how he has learned to practice a life of hope through the resurrection.

What a gift of God this book is. May you discover the reality of a biblical hope that reshapes life today.

My foreword for Mark Oestreicher’s book, Hopecasting.