Redeeming Hope

Hope is difficult to speak about with integrity. Too often, it is made to sound like denial—like a way to silence grief, soften injustice, or sidestep the complexity of human pain: “Everything happens for a reason”, or “She’s in a better place now”. I am frankly sickened by how Evangelical Christians celebrate God’s leading them to the love of their life or providing money for their grandmother’s cataract operation. Such claims compel us to question why this same God, who has the power to direct starry-eyed lovers into each other’s arms or to oversee gran’s ocular improvement, consistently fails to correct starvation or child molestation or typhoid. For the longest time I have found hope – real hope – to be elusive. Real hope doesn’t deny the abyss; it looks straight into it. It sees Golgotha, the scapegoat nailed in public shame, and does not turn away.

The world has left me feeling progressively more disillusioned of late: I have struggled to see how humanity might possibly disengage itself from violence and scapegoating. It seems to me that we remain unchanged by Jesus’s exposé of culture and religion. Instead we have perverted his message to fit our violent ideals of justice. We have made God in our image. Jesus’s mission seems like it failed: we are unchanged and unchangeable.

And yet, as I have reflected on the cross and resurrection this Easter season, from the tomb of my failed hopes, something unexpected is emerging.

In the resurrection of Jesus, we are given a glimpse—not of magic, but of the deepest structure of reality, unveiled. A glimpse of a future that already exists in the eternal heart of God. Not fantasy. Fulfilment.

We are used to thinking of Jesus’ resurrection as a one-off miracle—something that interrupts the normal flow of things. But what if it’s the other way around? What if this world—fractured, scapegoating, unloving—is the aberration, and the risen Christ is the true trajectory of creation? What if, in seeing him, we are seeing what we were always meant to become?

This is the hope that has been growing in me—not as a dogma, but as a quiet hunch, a theological intuition I can’t shake.

Let me explain.

We know the odds of life emerging in the universe are slim. The odds of intelligent life? Slimmer still. And the odds of intelligent life that can choose empathy over violence, self-giving over rivalry? Vanishingly small.

And yet… in an infinite or near-infinite cosmos, the improbable becomes inevitable. The sheer size of the universe may not be an accident of scale, but the condition of possibility for love to arise at all. If the universe is vast enough to make love statistically inevitable, then perhaps this vastness is itself a kind of mercy.

And what if, as some physicists suggest, ours is not the only universe? What if every possible outcome exists somewhere in the multiverse? Then there is at least one universe—one unfolding—where the crucifixion does not simply echo and vanish, but takes root. Where the cross catalyses not just personal conversion, but collective evolution. Where a species begins, slowly, to model its life not on rivalry and exclusion, but on Jesus. Where mimetic contagion gives way to mutuality, and peace is not maintained by violence but by love freely chosen.

In such a world, the cross becomes salvific not by appeasing wrath, but by reconfiguring desire. Not through divine punishment, but through the imitation of divine love.

And if such a world exists—even just one—then that world, in some deep and mysterious way, redeems all. Because if God is becoming—not static, not aloof, but the ultimate holon into which all things are drawn—then every part of the system participates in its fulfilment. Just as a seed contains the tree, so this broken creation contains, in potential, the new humanity we glimpse in Christ.

Paul calls Jesus “the firstfruits” (1 Corinthians 15:20). He is not merely resurrected; he is representative. The first of what is to come. And that means his risen body is not a return to what was, but a foretaste of what shall be.

We, trapped in linear time, can’t see the full tapestry. We feel only the frayed edge. We mistake the middle for the end. But the lamb was slain “from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8). The act that seems to happen in time is also outside of time. In eternity, the wound is already healed. The tears are already wiped away. The image of God in humanity is already restored.

And so the resurrection is not a happy ending. It is a glimpse of the truth—the eternal truth breaking through the illusion of finality.

This does not cancel our grief, or our work, or our responsibility. We are still called to resist scapegoating, to embody compassion, to unmask the powers. But we do so not to achieve the kingdom, but to align with what already is.

We hope—not because we can fix the world, but because the world is already being made whole, and the Jesus we saw bruised and broken is now radiant with the future of all things.

And that glimpse is enough for me.

Enough to hope.
Enough to trust.
Enough to live as though love really is the final word.