A friend of mine has recently taken up competitive rowing. He’s a big guy and quite fit, so I assumed he’d be a natural. When I quizzed him on how things were going he told me how careful you must be in the boat. Even the slightest imbalance will result in tipping over and falling into the river. He also shared how your stroke must be perfectly balanced to row in a straight line. Favour one arm more than the other, even by a fraction, and you’ll end up in the bank.
As I’ve been preparing for Easter it’s struck me that we need to achieve a similar balance in our lives; a balance between honesty and hopefulness. A balance that Easter itself provides.
Honesty
In 2024, as a church, we made our way through the Book of the Kings (1 and 2 Kings) together. If you’ve ever read the history of Israel between the death of David and the exile of the two kingdoms you’ll know how brutally honest it is; uncomfortably so on many occasions. There are child sacrifices, multiple murders, long conflicts, wars and famine. All of which shine a painfully honest light on humanity’s tendencies to conspire towards great evils when the LORD God is left behind.
We don’t really do honesty as a culture anymore. Criticism is re-labelled hate and there’s a danger that any faults or failings will be ignored in the name of tolerance or respect. It’s not honest and it’s a leaning of the boat that often leads to being capsized. We ignore what’s wrong at our peril.
Hope
Yet, as we made our way through the book, confronted by these disquieting true tales of human rebellion, we also spotted glimmers of hope. Time and time again God makes promises and sticks to those promises. In 1 and 2 Kings, we read stories of God’s miraculous provision; of prayer and rescue when it isn’t expected; and of God’s promises being kept. Mingled in with the ugliness of the human condition there is the light of God’s hope.
We don’t really have a secular equivalent for God’s hope. You might say there’s a pandemic of hopelessness in our culture. In the fleeting moments when we are at last honest with ourselves and each other, we soon realise that the quick fixes and platitudes of our social media of choice offer nothing in the way of real and lasting hope. Nothing that might fix our problems or suggest a better life is on the horizon.
The Book of the Kings concludes with a narrative that highlights this beautiful balance, of honesty and hopefulness, that we so desperately need. The northern kingdom has long been exiled, and now judgment is coming against the wickedness of the south. We’re introduced to a new king, Jehoiachin, who like so many others is described as one who ‘did evil in the eyes of the LORD’ (2 Kings 24:9).
The result is just judgment. Nebuchadnezzar, an instrument of God, besieges and conquers Jerusalem. Taking the king, his royal court, the temple treasures and ‘all Jerusalem into exile’ (2 Kings 24:14), Jehoiachin ends up as a prisoner in a foreign land, far from home and far from the royal estate he once enjoyed. There is so much honesty in these chapters and the generations that lead up to it that it might bring you to tears.
Yet there is also hope. The final words of the entire book speak about this same, wicked king, finding favour. After 37 years in exile, Jehoiachin was released from prison and received ‘a seat of honour higher than those of the other kings who were with him in Babylon. [He] put aside his prison clothes and for the rest of his life ate regularly at the king’s table’ (2 Kings 25:28-29). Here the story ends.
It’s quite the reversal and a manifestation of the hope we might have spotted all along.
Resurrection hope
As we were wrapping up our series in the Book of Kings my co-pastor paraphrased the wonderful D. A. Carson to describe the hope offered in the face of such honesty: ‘It’s nothing a good resurrection can’t fix!’ Stories like the ones found in Israel’s history should be training us and teaching us to look out for resurrection hope.
When we scratch our heads wondering what on earth certain behaviours are doing in our Bibles, our lives or in our worlds, we can confidently be honest because with God there is hope.
Easter provides us with this beautiful balance. There is the brutal honesty of the cross which exposes our individual and collective guilt. It plays out our human rejection of the Creator and lays bare the judgement we are all due. Yet Easter carries on beyond the cross. Three days later, that honesty is confronted by a wonderful hope, in a garden, near an empty tomb.
As Mary Magdalene and others gathered to mourn the loss of their beloved teacher and to confront the honesty of our fallen world, they found things out of place. Honesty had gone so far but it appeared as if things were going further. Realising the tomb was empty their tears multiplied and a ‘gardener’ asked Mary, ‘Why are you weeping?’ (John 20:15).
It’s no ordinary gardener, it’s the Great Gardener, the Lord Jesus himself, who asks because he knows that death could not hold him. He was walking, talking, living proof of what the angels had declared: ‘He is risen!’ (Matt. 28:6). Hope stood before Mary and hope stands before us. Jesus’ resurrection paves the way for hope. Paul describes it as the first fruits of what will come. Jesus himself said to John in his vision, ‘Behold, I am making all things new!’ (Rev. 21:5).
So, because of Easter, and the resurrection in particular, we can be honest and hopeful. There’s no need to steer into the bank or topple into the water. We can confidently have our guilt unmasked and our need for redemption laid bare by the crucifixion of Christ. We can have hope that there is something new awaiting us on the other side; the first fruits of which we have already seen; the full harvest we eagerly and confidently await. Easter is beautifully balanced and so too can be our lives.
