Happy Ever After?
The writers of Reality and Other Stories reveal why we can all hope that our life story will have a happy ending
As the couple kissed, the room erupted. One friend gently wept in happiness.
You might think we were guests at a wedding. In fact, we’d gathered to watch the Christmas special (and final episode) of cult British sitcom The Office.
After two series, writers Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant had insisted they had no plans to write any more. Central characters Dawn and Tim, whose friendship and flirty glances had tantalised the audience, seemed destined never to be together.
Then the Christmas special changed everything.
A storybook ending
The Office’s conclusion was, as TV critic Kathryn Flett put it, ‘everything we really wanted but hadn’t dared hope for.’
Yet is that strictly true?
The explosion of joy in living rooms as Tim and Dawn kissed indicated the total opposite: we’d hoped for precisely this.
There’s something in us that can’t help but hope for a happy-ever-after. Even the most cynical of us love uplifting endings. The Shawshank Redemption’s Red meets Andy on a Mexican beach; The Railway Children’s father returns home; ET reassures Elliot, ‘I’ll be right here.’
Somehow, we know how stories should end. One glance at audiences’ reactions to unsatisfying endings proves it: we may not know exactly what the ending should look like, but we’re certain it’s not this!
Where does that conviction come from?
However broken things are, however hopeless they seem, something within us senses that the world isn’t made just for chance uplifting endings here and there, but for a great happy-ever-after to come.
This conviction inspired us to write our recent book, Reality and Other Stories.
On the face of it, such hope seems wildly unrealistic. Given the pain in our lives and the way the world is, can we really believe that, as Samwise Gamgee puts it in The Lord of the Rings, everything sad is going to come untrue?
Christians believe that the events of the first Easter weekend say: yes, we can.
No dead end
The weekend started in tragedy.
Jesus’ crucifixion marked the end not just of an inspirational life, but a vision of the future. His earliest followers had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the long-promised King who would act with God’s authority to right the world’s wrongs. It was a conclusion they’d reached with good evidence: Jesus had caused the blind to see; he’d brought hearing to the deaf; those unable to walk found themselves leaping for joy.
Jesus’ earliest followers had allowed themselves to believe that he was The One. But now he had been killed. Happy-ever-after never seemed so far away.
Yet two events caused Jesus’ earliest disciples to dramatically reconsider the kind of story they were in.
These events invite us to do the same this Easter.
Two life-changing events
Firstly, Jesus’ tomb was empty.
As Jesus’ women followers went to embalm his dead body, they found his tomb empty. The early accounts include some wonderful eyewitness detail: Jesus’ graveclothes were neatly folded – laid aside, as if no longer needed.
It’s notable that no one disputed the fact of Jesus’ empty tomb for more than 150 years. It would have benefitted either the Romans or the Jewish religious leaders who’d opposed Jesus to point to an intact tomb, but they were unable to do so.
The discovery of empty tomb was the first history-changing event on the first Easter weekend. Yet by itself it would not have been enough to change history. It would just have been a mystery. A second occurrence made Jesus’ disciples willing to die on the claim that he had been raised from the dead.
Jesus appeared alive again, to multiple witnesses.
The Bible tells us about some of these meetings. Sometimes Jesus met individuals, sometimes he met groups. On one occasion, Jesus barbecued breakfast for his disciples. Another time, he appeared to more than five hundred people at the same time.
Many have tried to account for these appearances, but a resurrection-sized hole remains in their ideas.
The plainest reading is that Jesus truly rose from the dead. And this changes everything. For one thing, it makes that great happy-ever-after we long for possible again.
The story of my life
We are accustomed to thinking that we are people who will die on a planet that will die in a universe that will die. That means that, though there may occasionally be happy episodes within this big story, we assume the story written for us is ultimately a tragedy.
The events of the first Easter invite us to see ourselves within a wholly different plot-line. They say that, whilst there are many bleak and tragic episodes, we are actors in a story that will finish happily-ever-after. Though each of us has contributed our part to the world’s brokenness, Jesus died to secure the forgiveness of all who trust him, and he invites us to be part of his world made new.
‘Hope’, as Shawshank’s Red says, ‘is a dangerous thing.’ As much as we long for our happy-ever-after, it can be difficult to voice this hope, for fear of being disappointed.
But if we will allow it, Easter allows us to articulate such hope.
And as we look to Jesus’ folded graveclothes and the stories of transformation told by his worshippers worldwide, we can know that this hope is very well placed.