8. Good Friday: Hope is Dead

A Time for Tearing Down?

Today’s Christian holiday dovetails so nicely with our theme this season that I decided to take the opportunity to reflect on it.

On Good Friday, Christians “celebrate” the death of hope. Two thousand years ago, a few thousand people had placed their hope in one human being to rescue them from the destructive powers of this world. But those very powers annihilated their hero.

Evil won. Good lost.

It’s true that Jesus had given (what seems to us now obvious) hints about his plans to resurrect, but the disciples clearly failed to understand this like they failed to understand many of his teachings. At best, they had a vague promise that there might be something to hope for.

But was it a metaphor or was it literal?

In my own congregation, we host a service in which we start with a bunch of candles, and over the course of a series of readings we gradually put out all the candles one by one, until only one remains. Then a wild dissonant drum solo signals Jesus’ death and “the curtains of the temple being ripped in two.”

We remember how it felt to lose hope.

How We Feel

In ARF the past couple months, we’ve been reviewing the data about hopefulness around the world, and gradually winding our way toward some conclusions about the causes of declining hopefulness worldwide. The U.S. in particular is declining in hopefulness on a variety of metrics, despite our already being one of the ten least hopeful countries on Earth.

Both surveys leading up to and exit interviews after this past autumn’s Presidential election revealed the U.S. as a country seeking radical change and institutional deconstruction. The most-fired-up groups in the U.S. right now continue to be the anti-institutional, those who seek to tear down existing systems.

Ignoring the wealthy and educated elite (the audience of this blog) for a moment, this collective desire for change and tearing down is the closest thing I’ve seen in my adult life to an American consensus.

This spring I’ll be leading a series for my congregation’s men’s group on the book of Ecclesiastes, a book largely devoted to hopelessness and meaninglessness. In chapter three, we see this familiar passage.

3 There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:

² a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
³ a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
⁴ a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
⁵ a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
⁶ a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
⁷ a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
⁸ a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

I’ve bolded the portions which reflect the recent American survey data. This isn’t what I think we should do (or even what the survey respondents necessarily think we should do) but how most Americans feel.

But this isn’t just a feeling. As a country, we’re actually putting this into practice.

What’s Actually Happening

We’re at the very beginning of a new Presidential administration ideally suited—and arguably specifically elected—to tear down. In the first Trump administration we all witnessed a basic incompetence at building things. But now we’re witnessing a virtuoso effort at tearing down.

Let me list here some of the things that we’ve chosen to start (or accelerate) tearing down in the past few months:

• The post-WWII global order of alliances.

• Free trade.

• Economic predictability.

• The widespread illusion that we’re a hopeful destination for immigrants (represented by the Statute of Liberty).

• Stated (event if inconsistently lived) shared national values like honesty, respect, thoughtfulness, mercy, and faithfulness.

• Tech monopolies (see recent anti-trust cases).

• The balance of powers.

• Most Federal agencies.

• Elite universities.

• Many regulations.

• Judicial due process.

This list could go on.

Like me, it’s likely that all of you (perhaps gleefully) support some of these tearings-down and (perhaps despairingly) oppose others. But it’s hard to argue against this being a moment of tearing-down.

Trump might have just squeaked through the election due to his flaws, but the change and anti-institutionalism he resents are very popular.

“We” asked for it, and we’re getting it.

Theological Implications

Jesus taught that his crucifixion was God’s plan. I have no particular theology which can tell me whether this current political moment is some kind of broader plan. The rapid increase in deaths from AIDS and tuberculosis due to USAID cuts in particular seem hard to reconcile with my reading of scripture. But I certainly believe that God frequently uses what humans do—good and evil—in the long run.

I can certainly imagine a moment fifty years from now when we find ourselves having spent our destructive energy, and ready to build up again. As many writers (e.g. Robert Putnam, William Strauss and Neil Howe, Peter Turchin, etc…) suggest, some things run in cycles. This may be one of those things.

But some things also end and don’t come back, which any Native American will tell you. It’s entirely possible that the Barbarian A.I. hordes are soon to descend upon us and destroy or remaking everything, leading not to a return of something earlier but an entirely new era.

We just don’t know.

While the crucifixion might have been a plan, Jesus also taught that those who carried it out were misguided, most to be pitied. In other words, if I followed Jesus in the first century and worked for Rome or held a seat on the Jerusalem Council, I should have tried to stop it.

This implies that people of good will should not participate in the immoral aspects of the current deconstructive moment and should oppose them, even if the long-term outcome of this current period is part of some kind of divine plan.

Which factors are immoral is a theological and ethical question I won’t try and tackle, at least not today.

What Hope Remains

Like those first-century disciples of Jesus whose only hope took the form of esoteric promises they didn’t understand, we live in a world where hope seems to be departing, leaving us with nothing but esoteric and metaphorical promises.

They killed Jesus. We don’t exactly know what comes next.

Revelation describes the destruction of the “city of Babylon” and all its technological, militaristic, and sexual hubris, and its replacement by the resplendent “city of God.”

The “Revelation in one hand and the newspaper in the other” crowd might think that they understand the promises offered there. But the rest of us should have some humility, recognizing that first-century people also thought they understood their prophecies. If we’re as wrong as they were, then we’re in for some surprises.

In any case, as people of faith we have hope. While I haven’t described this current tearing-down moment as an apocalypse—because I don’t think it is—we have hope even in apocalypse.

It’s Good Friday. Jesus is dead. We live in a dystopia. But “unlike those who have no hope” (1 Thes. 4:13)—and whether or not you think this tearing-down period is good (or God’s will) or not—it won’t last forever. God promises that something will come after.

For anyone needing spiritual hope in this moment, I’d suggest reading this article from Comment Magazine.

To briefly summarize it, while a secular dystopia can represent the permanent end of all that is good and Holy, it is not so for us. Our dystopia is temporary.

Happy Good Friday.