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Hope for Resurrection

When people harm Jesus, he does not retaliate or try to get even. Instead, he loves and forgives. Even when soldiers are humiliating and killing him, Jesus is compassionate toward them: “Father, forgive them for they don’t know what they do” (Luke 23:34). Can you imagine loving and praying for your opposers even as they hurt and kill you?

How can Jesus be so weak when he’s supposed to be powerful? Even more, how can he ask us to be vulnerable like him? Wouldn’t we be humiliated or even put to death, like him?

Jesus believes that death is part of his human story—not the end of his human life. He trusts God to preserve his life and restore it, even through suffering and death. Three days after his burial, Jesus is restored to new life. Resurrection!

Jesus promises that, as his brothers and sisters, we will eventually experience his same resurrection. Brutal and dark as it is, death does not defeat the goodness and light of life that God creates.

So we stop fearing death. We stop hoarding resources and start sharing generously. We care for and pray for our opposers rather than trying to get even. We trust the power of God’s patient love and learn to live peacefully with one another.

Our hope is not focused on ways we can prevent death. Instead, we embrace the death that all of us, including Jesus, have to experience. And we do so with living hope in the resurrected, living Christ Jesus—our friend.