The last shall be first

There is much that we hope for, we who have cast our lot with Jesus of Nazareth. We hope for mercy, forgiveness, new life, eternal life. We hope for the promise of a new heart that—against  all odds!—beats in sync with our Maker, as promised by the prophet Ezekiel. We hope for the relief from pain, for relational wholeness, for freedom from the burden of crippling doubts and unmanageable burdens. We hope for heaven, whatever that might mean. We hope for justice and peace, shalom for all of creation, for lions with lambs, for swords into plowshares, for a new heaven and a new earth. We hope that we will be loved and healed and restored, despite all that we have contributed to the brokenness of a broken world. We hope for no more tears.  We hope to be with God. And to be able to stand it.

It’s quite a cocktail of hope that we embrace, that we cling to, that keeps us moving during times when hope seems like naïve and wildly wishful thinking. Everything will be all right. All shall be well and all manner of things shall be well. God, we hope so.

I hope for all of these things and many more besides. But one of the deepest hopes I have is for the Great Reversal that Jesus so often gestures toward. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. The losers and the misfits, the awkward and the rejected, the poor and the needy, the nobodies, the lonely, the ugly and the embarrassing, the incompetent and inconvenient, the ones whose primary experience in life is of being on the wrong end of the score, of being on the outside looking in, of not having enough, of being ignored and mistreated, of not being seen…