Day 14: Experience

So one option for what steers our hope is words: being told what to look for, what to expect.  But do we only hope when people tell us what our options are?  How does that line up with our lived experience?  What if our actual lives don’t support what we’re being told?  What happens then?

Some folks say that the OT hope was founded on the idea of God’s faithfulness.  I struggle with the idea of OT God as faithful.  Experiencing OT God sounds absolutely terrifying to me.  I probably wouldn’t even survive.  OT is harsh. 

OT God does come back around eventually, but OT God also commits genocide; sends plagues; sanctions gruesome, horrible, violent war; and submits really good people to all manner of pain for no apparent reason (#Job).  No one is safe.  That was what it was like to experience OT God.

The divine violence in the OT is as universal as the flood and as particular as Lot’s wife.  It is rampant. To me, it speaks more of moody melodrama and petulance than it does of faithfulness.  Is that the lived experience that’s supposed to shape our hope?  Do we just hope that everyone behaves and we dodge the bullet?  That the violence passes quickly and we are on the right side of it?  I’m just not sure about all of that.

Now, a NT experience as a harbinger of hope might be a little easier for me to wrap my head around, particularly if you ever hung out with Jesus.  While his words could be tough, it seems like the way he went through the world could lead you to believe that better things were possible.  And his words were only tough if you were kind of self-impressed.  I don’t think Jesus was much into self-impressed. 

The thing about any lived experience is that it’s kind of all over the map.  Some horror, some beauty.  Maybe hope means that we point toward the beauty despite the experience of the horror.  Maybe that’s the point.