The Music They Cannot Take

In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne does something that costs him dearly. Wrongly convicted and locked inside Shawshank Prison, he slips into the warden's office one afternoon and locks the door. He puts on a record — Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro — and broadcasts it over every loudspeaker in the yard.

For a few suspended minutes, the prison goes still. Hard men stop mid-step. Guards look up from their posts. Red, narrating from the yard, says he had no idea what those two Italian ladies were singing about, but "for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free."

Andy spends two weeks in solitary for it. When he emerges, gaunt and blinking in the light, he tells Red that hope is the one thing they cannot take from you — something that lives inside a person that no wall can reach.

That is biblical hope in human form. Paul writes that we groan inwardly, waiting for redemption — but we wait with hope, and hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5). Christian hope is not optimism dressed in religious language. It is a certainty planted deep in the soul by the Holy Spirit: that resurrection is coming, that suffering is not the final word, that the God who raised Jesus from the dead is working all things together for good.