There are three essential components to the Atonement of Jesus Christ - His suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane, His death upon the cross, and His resurrection. The Atonement would not be possible without all three of these events, and each of these teaches us a valuable lesson about hope. But this is not the bright, brittle hope that our most cherished desires will be realized without delay or that our every suffering will be banished immediately. That kind of hope is as glittering and as fragile as a soap bubble. The kind of hope that we find in the garden, the cross and the empty tomb sinks deeper than our despair, extends farther than our fears, and exceeds our wildest expectations. When Christ entered the garden, He had hoped that His friends would watch with Him. They did not. He had hoped that the cup might be taken from Him. It was not. The hope we find in the garden is not the hope that we will be spared from the kind of suffering that is greater than we can bear. The hope we find is that even when we must drink the bitter cup with no chance of relief or reprieve, there is nevertheless a purpose for our pain and a meaning for our misery. When we must continue to trod the winepress where the grapes of wrath are stored, there is still hope that our sacrifice will not be wasted, even if there is no hope that we will be spared from suffering unspeakable pain and anguish. Which leads us to the hope of the cross. No doubt Christ's disciples were filled with the hope that there must be some last second plan, that their Messiah would wrench Himself free from the nails with which He was bound and free Himself and abandon this foolish plan to die. This was not Christ's hope. The hope of the Cross is that all things, even the very Son of God Himself, must come to an end. It goes against our every natural instinct to look upon death and endings with anything but fear and darkness and despair, but there is hope in death. After all, in a battle with cancer, either the cancer dies or the patient dies. There is hope if the cancer dies and that is the hope that we can easily understand. With the death of cancer comes healing and recovery and a new lease on life. But with the death of the patient there is also hope. It is a hope that is strange and perhaps even unwelcome to those who must continue on with a gaping hole in their hearts, but for the person who has been hanging from their own personal cross and can finally say, It is finished, the hope that death brings makes perfect sense. Now, the third and final hope that the Atonement brings may seem a little more welcome, a little more familiar. After all, the possibility that what has died may yet live again seems like a lot of the fractured and broken hopes we had to discard during our time in the garden and on the cross. It may seem just as painfully impossible after we have lost and suffered so much that there can be any happy ending for us. But after we have endured more sorrow than we could bear and then watched, heartbroken, as our dreams and goals and plans were all killed right before our eyes, until even hope itself has died within us, the hope comes back. It may have been slain but it has risen again. Although we buried hope and laid a heavy stone over its final resting place and put guards over it, hope broke free from its tomb, banished its guards, and even though we swore that we were done, it filled us with its bright, resurrected glory once more. The hope of the empty tomb is the only hope that is unkillable because it already laid down its life once and has come back. The hope of the empty tomb is only possible because of the hope of the garden and the cross. When we can have hope even when we are in our own personal Garden of Gethsemane, even when we are hanging from our own personal Cross, then we can also have hope when we emerge triumphant from our own personal empty tomb. If we are truly followers of Christ, then we must follow Him to the garden, to the cross, and to the empty tomb, although we do so with hope constantly by our side.
