Easter Reflections

I have commented in the past on how much I love the Christmas season. It is easy to delight in the joy of the season, the festivities, the anticipation of the children, but also to be awed at the thought of the Creator taking on flesh to dwell among us. This Incarnation is such an enormous miracle, so unheard of in other religions that the infinite God would humble Himself to walk among us, that it makes the entire season one of unalloyed joy.

Many argue that Easter is the greater holiday, though. It is certainly clear that the Resurrection is the linchpin of Christianity. As the apostle Paul says, if Christ is not raised then we are yet in our sins and without hope in the world. And yet its joy is not unalloyed. That is the result, of course, of the great sorrow of Good Friday. At Easter, as at no other time of the year, we are confronted with the enormous ugliness of our own sinfulness. The crown of thorns, the merciless beating, the horrific death on the cross of Calvary all show us in a scene too horrible to look at the ugliness of our sin. When I have watched Mel Gibson's  movie The Passion of the Christ, I have to look away during the scourging. It is depicted very accurately in historical terms, and I cannot watch it. It is too painful to watch, especially when I know all too well why it happened.

There were hints of this at the Passover. When Israel was delivered from Egypt, the Jews would also have had their firstborn taken by the death angel had they not sacrificed the Passover lamb; they too were guilty enough to die. A substitute was needed. Even as God was delivering them His justice required recognition of the fact that they, too, were worthy of death. When Jesus re-interpreted the Passover at the Last Supper He made that connection more clear; He would be the substitute, for the Jews and all mankind. He became the Passover for all of us. So whenever we take the Lord's Supper we celebrate a new kind of Passover.

But that sacrifice is always in view, at least for me, at Easter. I did not want to see Mel Gibson's movie, but I forced myself to see it. When I have attended Passion plays, I have forced myself to go. I know what I am going to be confronted with, and it is ugly: my own sinfulness.

I think we could do better on Easter morning, or at least I could. I have a hard time shaking off Good Friday. I think the women at the grave and the Disciples did, too. 'Where have they taken His body?' they asked. But He was not there. ' He is Risen!' replied the angel. He is risen indeed! Let us rejoice, for the ugliness now has been dealt with.

Completely Inclusive?

In his book The Reason for God, Timothy Keller addresses one chapter to the accusation that Christianity is a straitjacket that robs people of the right to think for themselves and forces one set of values on everyone else. In the chapter he discusses the idea of truth and the issue of making a claim that a proposition or set of propositions is the truth. He points out that our Supreme Court has defined freedom as the right to define our own concept of truth; he also points out how people like Freud, Nietzsche and Foucault claimed that all truth-claims were just power-plays, seeking to control us while not noticing that they themselves were also making a truth-claim. All of this leads to an untenable position among modernists: they claim to have the truth while also claiming there is no truth. This led Chesterton to point out that modern rebels are total skeptics, never trusting anyone and denouncing anything that claims to contain 'truth'. The result is that such a rebel can never be a true revolutionary, because to be a revolutionary is to reform the status quo with a better system: and to be 'better' implies a moral doctrine of some kind, a claim to be 'true' in a more fundamental way. So modern rebels are truly, like the book title, rebels without a cause.

All of this leads Keller to conclude that no community can be totally inclusive. Every community has to have a set of moral constraints that hold it together which it considers true; it cannot tolerate those who ignore those constraints. Our system in the U.S. requires some basic beliefs about property rights, rule of law, freedom of speech, and so on that will not allow stealing,  killing our children for changing religion, and other things. We cannot be inclusive of those who will not live within those boundaries. This calls into question the fallacious idea of a growing part of our society who seem to think that it is possible to be totally inclusive; that somehow we should tolerate most anything, failing to see where that could lead us in the long run.

This also raises questions about how we act in the broader world. Keller comments that 'every account of justice and reason is embedded in a set of some particular beliefs about the meaning of human life that is not shared with everyone'.  A couple of weeks ago a nut-case in Florida burned a copy of the Quran; the radical Islamists in Afghanistan responded by killing a number of people in Afghanistan, both U.N. staff and some Afghans as well. Karzai, the ne'er-do-well head of the government, used the burning to incite the trouble, making no effort to calm it. While I think we were fully justified to depose the Taliban after 9/11 by evicting them from Afghanistan, it is fairly clear that the 'set of particular beliefs about the meaning of human life' there is far from ours. Should we be fighting for them? My feeling is that we need to limit our goals in the Islamic world to only matters that clearly involve our own security and interests. Their underlying values are not something I wish to defend. I think we had a legitimate interest in deposing the Taliban in the wake of 9/11; it is much less clear that the popularly elected regime there now is worthy of our support.