This coming weekend the Christian Church launches into Holy Week; the week leading up to Easter. It’s the most significant event in the Christian calendar because it focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ.
Tomorrow is ‘Palm Sunday’, the day when Jesus entered Jerusalem and began his inexorable journey toward his death. The problem was, none of his followers had worked out what his plan was. There were plenty of people celebrating his arrival at the great city because they were convinced God was going to destroy the Roman occupiers through Jesus obvious divine power. With the benefit of hindsight we know it didn’t work out that way. It was never Jesus intention to use violence, but rather sacrificial love.
As you can imagine the crowd’s immense joy and hope quickly turned to despair. Thus Holy Week is a time to reflect on the how despair often results in denial, betrayal and hopelessness.
Palm Sunday is a reminder that great expectations can result in significant, personal frustration.
I am aware that I have many expectations in life. I expect that I will die before my children. I expect that I’ll manage to keep my job and I expect to keep my marriage in tact for the remainder of my life and so on. However these things don’t always work out the way we expect.
I remember in this midst of a particularly dark experience that a good friend told me to change my language. “Don’t live with ‘expectation’ when it comes to what can’t be controlled”, he said. “Instead, live with great hope.” It became an interesting shift in my field of vision.
Hope is a very human thing, yet it’s very difficult to define. Expectation is very business like. It has the implication of a requirement that if not met, the result will be someone throwing his or her toys out of the cot. Hope is equally based in desire, but it understands the unpredictability of people, events and circumstances outside its control.
Hope offers ongoing life despite outcomes. Expectation promises much but the outcomes rarely match the original intention and usually come at great relational cost.
Now it might appear that hope is merely for losers, and there will always be people who see it that way. However I think it’s the other way round. People who have grasped hope as a way of living very rarely get stuck when failure or tragedy arrives. Hope gives us the capacity to face our reality, let go and move on. Shattered expectations are much harder to deal with because we have too much of who we are resting on an outcome.
Easter reminds us that when our hope is in God through Christ, there is always new life at the end of what might seem like a huge disaster.
© Digby Wilkinson 2008