A Living Hope

30 March 1929 | Cincinnati Enquirer

A Living Hope by Dr. Jesse Halsey, Minister of the Seventh Presbyterian Church

God and Father—Our Lord Jesus Christ—A Living Hope—The Resurrection—An

Inheritance Incorruptible—I. Peter 1:3-4

Easter comes with its message of Hope and Courage; like all deep things it begins in mystery. We don’t pretend to understand all that happened on the first Easter Day nineteen centuries ago, but we believe that the Lord Jesus showed Himself alive to his friends, and that in their new-found faith they went out to transform the world. Faith in God leads one to expect the great and mysterious. We live in no simple world; mystery—the mystery of life and death—surrounds us. We reach out beyond the things we see.

I believe first of all because I want to believe. One, at times, may argue the question of immortality and consider the case unproven, but let some one of his own flesh and blood pass within the veil and reason surrenders the place to love, so that many a hard man has set his face toward God in hope of one day seeing a little head on which the sun is ever shining. Napoleon said that the heart was a place in the body where two large veins met, and that a statesman needed to have his heart in his head. The same ideal possesses the formal philosopher. It is only when one says with Tennyson, “I have felt,” that he will experience the strong urge of the unseen world. “I can’t and I won’t disbelieve.”

This does not mean that our hopes are unreasoned and are but a fond imagination. There are good and sufficient reasons for believing, but first comes the attitude of mind and heart that is positive, constructive, and desirous.

We are citizens of two worlds. One is material and tangible, like water; the other is spiritual, unseen, intangible, like air. But the latter is no less real than the former. Our bodies are of the earth earthy, but we are spirit, living in a transitory earthly tenement. Some day we will slip off this “body of humiliation,” but the eternal spirit will take its way to God, who is the Author of life and our Eternal Home.

It is not selfishness that makes us want to live on, but a stern conviction that the best that the universe knows is that spiritual reality, which we vaguely call personality. The faith and hope and love that we have experienced in life—our friendships, all convince us of the value of persons. If anything in the universe has permanence, it ought to be these supreme values. Such values we enthrone at the heart of things in God.

And in Jesus Christ we have seen all lovely qualities incarnate. His life—so beautiful, so strong—we call divine. Is it reasonable to think that reality like this goes out in death? Can a few nails and a Roman spear end such a life? If death could destroy Jesus Christ I find my essential faith destroyed—faith in the reality of all human values; faith in God; faith in reason; faith in an ordered universe. Then the materialist is right—biochemistry explains everything in the realm of human life and faith and love and hope mean nothing!

So while we keep the feast of the Savior’s Immortality we pause in grateful remembrance of all the pure and beautiful souls who have walked with us in strength and gentleness and love. We are strengthened in the assurance that what was bound up with our life and made a dear part of our being cannot be lost; that they and we are safe in the hands of God our Father, who brought Jesus Christ through the experience of death into a new life which those who follow Him may share. God is the God of this and every world, visible and invisible. Character like Christ’s resides in Him, and He is pledged by the very nature of His being to honor the supreme qualities for which the whole creation labors.