Prisoners of Hope

Eastertide greetings from Ireland! Where I, like most of you, am in stay-at-home mode due to the corona virus pandemic. Here in Ireland we're allowed out for grocery shopping and exercise within 2km (1¼ mile) of our homes. Fortunately, for me that 2km includes the seafront, which I'm taking full advantage of to walk or bike each day. A very important outlet for a super-extrovert like me in lock-down alone!

And fortunately I’m too busy to feel lonely most of the time. No international travel at the moment, of course. But because much of my work is at a distance anyway, all of that continues. I’m teaching Bible interpretation to Fuller Seminary students online, supervising my Ethiopian student’s MA thesis, reaching out locally through MeetUp connections (though no face to face MeetUps at this point!), trying to get some academic writing done, and trying to stay on top of the usual collection of other theological education projects. Plus lots of people are adding lots of other online meetings.

So, much of my day probably looks a good bit like yours does at this point:

Thank goodness for video chat! Last week the missions committee from one of my partner churches zoomed in to ask how I'm doing and about life in Ireland during the pandemic. Since they recorded our conversation for their website, I'll share the first part of it below for those of you who are interested in hearing more.

Even with all that, though, I do feel like a prisoner – of my limited space, but perhaps more profoundly of the severe and unpredictable circumstances we’re all facing. Which may be why I resonated so deeply with the passage from Zechariah 9 that formed the center of our Serge Easter celebration. It comes just a few lines after the part that predicts the messiah king’s arrival on a donkey. God says:

¹¹ As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
   I will set your prisoners free from the waterless pit.
¹² Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
   today I declare that I will restore to you double.

At a time when the Israelites are relieved to think their exile is over, when they are going home to Jerusalem with the expectation that things will be great again, they discover that their national life is still complicated and precarious. God speaks to them in that disarray and uncertainty – looking back across centuries to ‘the blood of my covenant,’ and at the same time ahead to future restoration. He calls them ‘prisoners of hope.’ Is their ‘stronghold’ the city of Jerusalem? Or is it God himself? In fact their hope is built on the solidity of God’s own initiative in declaring them his covenant people, and on the certain promise of a future where all God’s plans come to fruition. While Jerusalem is still in tatters around them they are ‘hopeful prisoners’ and people captivated by the hope God offers them.

I keep coming back to the idea of being a ‘prisoner of hope’ during this pandemic and its unpredictable aftermath. Yes, fear and anxiety about the present and the unknown future are real. It’s tempting to think that my work or my home or anything else is my stronghold. But my only real hope is grounded in looking back to God’s choice to make me his own, and in looking forward to the surety that God is taking human history exactly where he intends it to go, that restoration – re-creation, resurrection – will happen. I want to be a ‘prisoner of hope’ during this time. Maybe you do, too?