Disappointment With Jesus

A couple of months ago, I prayed pretty consistently for a specific something that specifically did not happen.  It wasn't for anything for me. It wan't totally unreasonable or outside the realm of possibility. It was the kind of thing that I would think Jesus would want to do.

The specifics of it don't really matter all that much, it's something that anyone of us who prays regularly and who's not afraid to actually ask for something specific eventually and maybe regularly experiences.  Disappointment with Jesus happens when we pray and when along with that we have some hoped-for outcome or expectations that he might come through in a specific way.

Last week I was reading Jesus's interaction with the men on the road to Emmaus shortly after his resurrection.  They're talking about their heartbreak over Jesus's execution, not yet knowing about the resurrection: "but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel."

There it is: disappointment with Jesus. "But we had hoped."  Something unexpected or unwanted happened, "but we had hoped" that Jesus would do something, change something, move in some way, make a difference in some specific way.  Disappointment with what Jesus did or didn't do is a significant part of what they're mourning. "But we had hoped."

It strikes me that my disappointment from a couple of months ago, and the regular/occasional disappointments that I've processed over a couple of decades of journaling, could all start with that exact same phrase: "But I had hoped..."

Part of what makes that particular Emmaus story so freighted, of course, is that they're processing their grief with the resurrected Jesus, who reveals himself later.  And it's here that I had my own awakening about my own disappointments.

The men on the road to Emmaus had much smaller expectations and hopes than the resurrected Jesus accomplished.  They had merely hoped for the redemption of Israel. Jesus has just conquered sin and death for the whole world. Their expectations and agendas and hopes and dreams for Jesus were much lower and lesser than what Jesus was actually up to.  It would just take them a while to get their hearts and minds around it.

I don't think that this is what's happening every single time we experience disappointments of this type. Sometimes we're just disappointed with what Jesus does or doesn't do and we never experience or see a larger redemptive purpose.  This isn't a sit-com and everything doesn't wrap up in 28 minutes.

But my guess is for a large percentage of my "but I had hoped" prayers and disappointments, were I to look back through them all, I'd find that my hopes and asks were much smaller, more parochial, less grand, less important than they seemed at the time.  And that what Jesus is up to is much more sweeping and compelling and transformative than the small things I'm asking him to do.