A dying child.
A dying parent.
A dying marriage.
A dying friendship. 

Sometimes pain can be so potent, so chest-crushing, so soul-deep that hope feels delusional. 

Better to resign to ​“reality,” we may reason, than to multiply our sorrows through unmet hopes.

Part of learning to live in the hope of resurrection is learning how, where, and in whom to place that hope. 

If our hope is that broken things be restored precisely to their former state, disappointment awaits — and as a result of disappointment, blindness. We can miss resurrection when it shows up in our midst.

You see this in the Gospels. As best I can tell, resurrected Jesus looked different than pre-resurrected Jesus.

Mary at the tomb mistook him for a gardener until he said her name. 

The two on the road to Emmaus mistook him for a stranger until he broke the bread. 

Those stories can have other explanations: Mary was crying; the two were supernaturally kept from seeing him. A story in John 21 persuades me that immortally-clothed Jesus didn’t (and doesn’t) look like mortally-clothed Jesus. 

The disciples are fishing, back to what they used to do and catching nothing, when they see someone on shore. They don’t recognize it’s Jesus until…. 

“Throw your net on the right!”

Peter’s heard that before. He dives in (of course), and the others follow in the boat. Jesus invites them to breakfast. Then comes a curious phrase: 

“None of the disciples dared ask him, ​‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord.”

When you’ve been camping with someone for the last thousand days, it goes without saying that you’d recognize him. But Scripture says it, and the only reason I can figure for that is because he looked different.

Altered appearance may also account for another oddity at the end of Matthew when Jesus meets the eleven on a mountain in Galilee: 

“When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” 

What’s there to doubt? It’s Jesus! In the flesh! He was dead; now he’s not. Doesn’t that drive out all possible doubt? Ah, it would if he was exactly as they remembered him, doing what they thought a Messianic King should do. Some of them must have been hoping for something else. 

But they came around. The first followers of Jesus learned a hope that couldn’t be disappointed. They learned to recognize Jesus at the tomb and the table, on the shore and in the shadow of death. So can we.

Peter was one of the first to believe. He went from fear-filled denier to faith-filled hoper. Not long before his own crucifixion, he wrote:

In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade…. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith — of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire — may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy… (1 Peter 3)