Hope

Can we talk about VeggieTales for a moment?  Broccoli.  Celery.  Gotta be: VeggieTales! 

I (Aimee) love VeggieTales (www.veggietales.com).  They’ve been around for over 20 years now, but I only heard about them for the first time while I was in college.  Since then I’ve collected older episodes and I’ve been sure to pre-order new episodes from my local Christian bookstore as they’ve become available and now I own all of them. 

I love watching VeggieTales, but what I love the most is sharing them.  It’s great watching the reactions of someone whose never seen VeggieTales before, or as they watch an episode that they’ve never seen.  So, I want to share with all of you one of my absolute favorite episodes: ‘An Easter Carol.’

Brilliantly, the folks at Big Ideas took Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and changed it up for Easter.  Ebenezer Nezzer doesn’t understand the true meaning of Easter.  So the ghost of his grandmother informs him that he will be receiving a visitor who is going to help him to understand.  That visitor, Hope, is a small angel who takes Ebenezer on a journey through Easter past, present, and future.  Hope shows him that Easter is all about … well … hope!  I think that there are lots of things that we can learn from the story of Easter, but hope is definitely a huge one.  What hope would we have if not for the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ?!

I know that I talked about hope at Christmas time, and I’m not taking that back.  The birth of Jesus, His physical entry on the worldly scene, should most definitely be a source of our hope.  But the story only began at Christmas (and the great thing about this story is that it has no end).  Christmas was the beginning of what had been hopped for for generations: the birth of the Messiah.  But, none of that would matter if there had been no Easter.  Have you ever thought about that fact?  If Jesus had come, lived an amazing life, and then died, and that was the end of the story, then that would have been the end of the story.  He would have been just another prophet at best, or an outright liar at worst. 

As Hope told Ebenezer, if the death of Jesus had been the end of the story then there would be no hope.  Only the hope that God’s redeemer was still to come ‘someday’ … whenever that day would be.  Praise God that there was more to the story than that!  Instead of death being the end, He came back to show us that there is still hope for a future where there will be no more pain and no more suffering and no more tears.  He gave us hope that we can break away from our slavery to sin.  He gave us hope that there is more to this life than what the world has to offer.

Christmas was a fulfillment of God’s promise that a redeemer would come.  But the actually redemption came with His death and resurrection.  It came with Easter morning.