We had hoped he was the Messiah who had come to rescue Israel. - Luke 24:21
Then Jesus said to them, “You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. - Luke 24:25
You know what that phrase, “We HAD HOPED…” PAST TENSE means? It means, “We used to have hope, but we do not have hope anymore.” What have you hoped for in your life at this point? In your marriage? In your career? In your physical health? In your finances? In your relationships with your kids – where did you USED TO have hope… that you don’t anymore?
The disciples traveling the road to Emmaus with Jesus after his resurrection told him, “We had hoped… That knowing Jesus would actually mean something different. But here we are – just a couple of dudes, walking the road back to Emmaus.” By the way, you know why they’re walking to Emmaus from Jerusalem? Because they’ve given up and they’re going home. The women had told them – HEY!! JESUS IS ALIVE! THE PACKAGE HAS BEEN DELIVERED! And they didn’t believe it. We thought He was different. We had hoped that He was the messiah, and that the idea of a Messiah meant something different. We had hoped…
So these former disciples are headed home and have no idea that the delivery they were waiting for is now walking on the road with them and is in the process of explaining everything that had to happen for Him to be right there in front of them – and they don’t even recognize it. Their miracle is in the process of unfolding. But they can’t see it. They haven’t tracked it. They expected it to get here sooner in a package that looked different. But now the package is walking along side them and they haven’t even realized it yet. As soon as they do, it’s going to change everything about their lives. The reality of this delivery goes so much farther than they think. But right now, they’re stuck in their expectations of what they’d hoped for – to the point that even Jesus says, “You find it so hard to believe… what God has done and is doing in your life. So hard to believe… How far He’d go to deliver all of Heaven right to your door. You don’t even see it unfolding even now.”
I’ve been a pastor for a long time at this point, and I honestly think there are a couple of reasons that people don’t experience as much resurrection in their lives as they were hoping for and so they give up… One is they just don’t believe the miracle could go that far, and another is that believing it could is too disruptive to their lives. So we become people who had hoped. And giving up on hope can look a lot of different ways – most of the time it doesn’t look like what we think it does. Giving up on your faith for the things YOU HAD HOPED FOR doesn’t always look like sulking, pouting, shrugging your shoulders and kicking a can around the block, muttering to yourself about what God hasn’t done for you.
Most of the time, giving up looks like apathy – it’s just adjusting your expectations and practices to your experience of reality rather than what you used to hope for in faith. So – giving up doesn’t look like telling people you’re not a Christian anymore. But it can look like not going to church because you’ve given up on the idea that church is worth going to. It doesn’t always look like divorcing the person you’re married to, but it can look like living inside of a very hard relationship and accepting the misery and pain it comes with as normal. Giving up can look like giving up on eating right and exercising because you think that how you feel is just how adults are supposed to feel. It can look like going through the motions in your career even though you don’t really have a sense of purpose in it because you don’t think God has called you to anything else. It can look like never getting time with your teenage kids – because everyone else lets youth activities and sports and social media get to their kids before they do – so you give up on hoping you can develop a deeper relationship with them as they grow and you just kind of accept life with your kids as it’s handed to you…
Giving up can look like maybe not living in full-blown addiction to something, but dabbling in just enough of it that it you’re using it as an escape. It can look like settling in your dating life for the next available instead of holding out for someone you connect with, who shares your values and your faith – it’s easier to adjust my values and faith than it is to find a miracle in a haystack, isn’t it? It can look like burying your trauma, ignoring your grief, not paying attention to and stuffing your feelings of hurt from things you’ve been through – because you think that the most healing you’re gonna get out of God is enough to be functional in a world that’s just gonna do it to you again, so the best thing you can get from God is a faith for things to be different someday when you die – but until then, we let those hopes go – it’s what we USED TO hope for… we had hoped. Now, we just hope to get by and get through.
Here's what the road to Emmaus speaks over us on Easter morning – that the real danger about miracles isn’t that God doesn’t still do them. He does. And it isn’t that He won’t deliver on them. He will. The danger isn’t that you’ll hope for too much and then be let down and then quit. THE REAL DANGER WITH THE MIRACLE GOD WANTS TO DO IN YOUR LIFE is that it’s going to take longer to show up than you thought, and it’s going to look different than you thought it would when it gets here, so you can tell the story of what you hoped for, but you won’t recognize it as it’s unfolding in your life.
The danger of Easter isn’t hoping for too much and being disappointed in your faith. The real danger is hoping for too little, and not understanding that God doesn’t DO little, so you don’t see it as it’s arriving, and you miss the full impact of the delivery because the miracle didn’t fit inside the box you thought it would arrive in. The disciples were hoping for an earthly Kingdom, Jesus said, “I’ve been telling my people since the beginning of time – I came to deliver you eternity.” They were hoping to defeat the Romans. Jesus said, “I defeated DEATH – it’s a much bigger problem, and I’ve taken care of it.”
The danger of Easter is that your expectations are too little, of a God that’s too small, for a life that fits into the parameters of what you can conceive of and think of – When God says that what I’m trying to do in your life is more than you’d ever know to ask. It’s more than you’d ever dream to imagine – you don’t even know what you don’t know about how far this miracle goes. You don’t know how long I’ve been trying to deliver this to you. I’ve been doing this since the beginning of time – you think I’m gonna fumble the package on the doorstep of your house?
Your miracle might require your participation. You might have to do the counseling and the therapy. You might have to get the treatment. You might have to work through the problem in the relationship. You might have to pay off the debt. But I’m walking on the road with you! I’m right beside you! I’ve been providing for you the entire time and the whole way – I’m not going to fumble the package now! I’m closer than you think! I’ll explain to you what you don’t know! Your problem isn’t that you used to hope for something that you didn’t get! Your problem is that what I want to give you is so big, and it’s so whole, and it’s so holy, and it’s so healing, and it’s so overwhelmingly beautiful that you don’t even know what it looks like when I’m in the process of walking it out with you!
The danger of Easter isn’t that the FedEx truck from Heaven can’t find your house. The danger is that you’ll give up and not be there when He arrives!. The miracle of Easter, the resurrection God wants to do in your life – I know it’s taking longer than you’d like. I get it that this isn’t what you through it would look like – I’ve been there in my own life! But once you start seeing what He’s doing as He’s walking… You can’t unsee it. It’s so much bigger, it’s so much more, it goes so much farther than you think.