Wait Without Hope

I've been reading NT Wright's Christian's At the Cross. And, this post might be better suited for Holy Week as the entire book is a retelling of Wright's messages from Holy Week 2007 with the parishioners of the Church of the Ascension in Easington Colliery, an abandoned mining town northeast of Manchester in the UK.

And though, I probably will reflect more on the book during Holy Week, I could not help but post on the section for Holy Saturday in the moment.

I have been struck in recent weeks by the idea of a language of lament, and posted about it previously.

In his reflections on Holy Saturday, Wright quotes from Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, in which Eliot pushes us to think about hope and waiting:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing

As Wright then positions the poem on Holy Saturday and asks us to think through the lens of those trying to cope with all that has gone wrong, with the death and subsequent burial of Jesus.

And it is important that we think in terms of "all that has gone wrong", because I'm sure if we think "crucifixion" we cannot help, but reinterpret the moment through our our revisionist perspective and read a hope into the story that was not present for those who were waiting.

So, we retain the seed of the idea that something had gone terribly wrong.

And we rest in this moment. Something is terribly wrong.

I think Wright's meditation here is worth breathing in:

If you want God's hope instead of yours; if you want God's love instead of yours; if you want God's thoughts instead of yours - then you will need to go through a time of silence, of resting, of ignorance and dispossession.


Dispossession. Ignorance. Rest. Silence. To learn to hope with a hope that is not mine.