Easter Means Hope, Not Optimism
Photo by Ministry Pass
When asked if he was optimistic or pessimistic about the future, the bishop and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin replied, "I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead."
Put differently, if the pessimist expects things to turn out badly, and the optimist expects things to turn out well, the resurrection of Jesus gives us not an expectation but an event in history. The miracle of Easter is not about what we expect to happen (for good or ill) but that the unexpected did happen. Thus, the resurrection of Jesus is not an expectation, it is a foundation. As Newbigin so helpfully names, Easter grounds our lives in something that is deeper than both the cynicism that infects our culture and the optimism that plagues the church.
A Pessimistic Culture: Engaged and Enraged
A generation ago, Neil Postman warned about mixing news with entertainment. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he warned that knowledge itself would suffer if we could no longer differentiate between information and titillation. Of course, he sounded the alarm bell when there were basically four television channels, cable was not even on the horizon, news was not a twenty-four hour phenomenon, and the internet was not even on the horizon.
If anything, Postman was too optimistic. As many commentators have noticed, the twenty-four hour news cycle is well-suited to a massive world event like September 11, 2001. However, when stations rely on advertisers for funding, maintaining the attention of the audience becomes the driving factor, and most days (thanks be to God) there are not national emergencies or consequential world events. A result of this is that everything gets treated as an emergency in order to keep us engaged, and as a result, one who simply wants to stay informed may find that their spiritual and emotional peace is in decline.
The proliferation of entertainment news, social media, and the podcast ecosystem, both on the left and the right, has only fed this vicious cycle. The algorithms that run our devices, engineered along similar principles to Las Vegas slot machines, are designed to keep us engaged by keeping us enraged. Even traditional news outlets are looking to comedians and podcast culture to bolster their shrinking audiences. The result is increased volume and decreased insight, more noise than signal, an abundance of snark and a poverty of reflection. For an interesting point of comparison, watch the documentary Best of Enemies, about the heated 1968 debates between the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley. Heated, yes, but far more substantive than what passes for political discourse on television and YouTube in our day.
One response to this cesspool of vitriol is to make a full sprint in the opposite direction, into a saccharine optimism that is attractive but vacuous.
The Fool’s Gold of Optimism: The Stockdale Paradox
“All that glitters is not gold,” goes a famous aphorism, perhaps best known from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Optimism, on the surface, glitters with positivity. And in our culture today, positive is virtually synonymous with good. As Tara Isabella Burton describes in her recent book Strange Rites, the discussion or naming of anything negative is now perceived as “toxic.” This lingo, at once pseudo-spiritual and pseudo-scientific, describes something to be avoided lest it taint us. To many of today’s influencers and positivity-pushers, life is all about good energy or “vibes,” and we will get what we want—via the so-called “law of attraction”—by thinking and acting positively about it. This is, of course, Norman Vincent Peale redux. But then and now, optimism sells, not just on the bestseller list but in the pulpit as well. It sells, but is it worth the price?
On September 9, 1965, Navy Pilot Jim Stockdale was shot down over North Vietnam. He became a prisoner of war in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, alongside future senator John McCain. For over seven years, Stockdale was regularly tortured, and he endured solitary confinement for four of those years. He survived and was eventually released, continuing to serve in the Navy, eventually earning the rank of Admiral.
Jim Collins interviewed him for his bestselling leadership book Good to Great, and in the course of the interview he called the salty Admiral an optimist. Stockdale abruptly corrected the author, and to his surprise said it was actually the optimists who did not survive their brutal confinement.
The optimists, according to Stockdale, always believed they would be home by Christmas, and when Christmas came and went they would lose hope, and with it the will to live. What the former prisoner of war then described became what Collins called the "Stockdale Paradox." He said their thriving in the worst circumstances depended on being willing to both 1) “confront the brutal facts” about their situation and 2) maintain an absolute belief that they would eventually be set free and even thrive.
Optimism is like candy. In an angry and anxious age, it is sweet to the taste but provides no nutritional value. At best it is a blinkered and shriveled version of hope, one of the great theological virtues described in 1 Corinthians 13.
Easter Hope: Beyond Optimism and Pessimism
In The Character of Virtue, Stanley Hauerwas’s collected letters to his godson, Hauerwas offers a remarkable reflection about Christian hope. Characteristic of his narrative approach to theology and ethics, he connects hope both to the stories we tell and to the related virtue of patience. For Hauerwas, patience is needed to keep hope honest. “Hope without patience can tempt us to utopian fantasies,” he notes.
According to historian Alan Kreider, patience was perhaps the primary virtue of the early church. But without patience we turn—in our instant culture of Tik-Tok, tweets, and drive-thru dinners—to a stultifying optimism, often coupled with aggressive activity determined to bend the world to our will. When our hope is in the self and not patiently grounded in the promises of a God who acts (but not according to our timeline or expectations), we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. In our frustration, we may run over our neighbors or drive ourselves into despair attempting to bend the arc of history to our will. In desperation, we may also buy what the snake oil salesmen are selling. Prosperity preaching, present in its most obvious form in preachers like Joel Osteen, and sleeker versions like Hillsong, is always dripping with optimism.
Far from the God who declares in Isaiah 55:8, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways,” the optimistic deity of the prosperity gospel is easily comprehended, and (rather conveniently) wants all the things for us that we want for ourselves. Whether or not our wants have been sanctified is not up for question. The high priests and priestesses of optimism are eager to tell us precisely how to activate the divine vending machine in the sky to gain what we want on our terms.
Of course, disappointment always follows eventually, because this is not how the God of the Bible and the great tradition operate. I suspect it is impossible to calculate how many people have left the faith due to discovering, far too late, that the prosperity doctrine in which they had (literally) invested was actually bankrupt all along. Hope is a virtue, grounded in the incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. Optimism is at best its shrunken, secularized shadow.
So again, with Lesslie Newbigin: I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Death is real, sin is real, evil claims people, communities, institutions. Serious injustice and oppression exist in our world. Pain and tragedy and grief are real. These are brutal facts that must be confronted. Optimism is a lie, Good Friday is real. But Easter is the deeper reality.
The tomb is empty. This means that death and sin, chaos and pain, cancer and tragedy, brutality and greed do not get the last word with us, our loved ones, or our world. John 1 describes Jesus as the Word of God, the Logos made flesh. God's Word gets the last word. Easter is God's promise that God's Word writes the conclusion to our story. John Wesley ends his wonderful sermon “The New Creation” with this vivid, hopeful image:
“And, to crown all, there will be a deep, an intimate, an uninterrupted union with God; a constant communion with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ, through the Spirit; a continual enjoyment of the Three-One God, and of all the creatures in him!”
At Easter Jesus is raised from the dead both as a vindication of his divine identity as God's Son, but also as a promise and foretaste, a preview of God's plan for the cosmos: restoration, renewal, new creation. Our sins, individual and collective, do not get to thwart God's plan. That is not a theory, expectation, or a wish, but a promise made good on Easter that will one day be true for all creation. To live into that promise takes patience. We live in the in-between time, between Christ’s first and second coming. The Kingdom is present, but the old order of things has not yet fully passed away. We live in hope because we know the last chapter has been written, graciously saving us from either bleak pessimism or vapid optimism.
I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.
Drew McIntyre is an Elder in the Western North Carolina Conference and the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC. He serves on Firebrand’s Editorial Board.