Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Easter is my favorite day of the year. My
favorite festival of the Church. Here is where it all comes together. Here is
where we see God’s plan for us and all of creation most clearly. We see it’s,
to borrow geek terminology, “final form.”
But I’m somewhat alone in my opinion. Easter is
often a pale shadow to the juggernaut of Christmas. And I’m starting to think I
know why. It’s because of Jesus.
At Christmas, Jesus is a baby. Helpless,
powerless, functionally mindless. A tabula rasa. A blank slate. There is little
indication of the man he will become in the infant that he is, which makes it
easier for us project our desires, our will, our intentions upon him.
The adult Jesus of Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and
Easter, not so much. The real Jesus is so unlike the Jesus we really want.
This ties in to a large degree with what I spoke
of last week. God giving us what we need, rather than what we want or desire.
Our image of Jesus, the picture we create in our own minds of who he is, is
often a reflection of ourselves. He likes the same things we like; he’s
passionate about the same things we’re passionate about; he cares about the
same things we care about, and he hates the same things we do.
Atheists often mock us by saying that we “create
God in our own image,” and they’re not far off the mark. This is something
we’ve first been doing since we were first introduced to him all those
centuries ago. The Pharisees, the Rabbis, and the people of his day were hoping
he would be someone different than what he was. They wanted the Messiah to
be...
·
...concerned about moral purity and personal righteousness. He
wasn’t.
·
...angry about the Roman occupation. He didn’t care.
·
...someone who would perform magic tricks on command. He didn’t.
·
...someone who would tell them they were right and those other
folks over there were wrong. Nope.
They wanted a God in their own image, one who
would affirm them and condemn their enemies. And we have changed so very little
in this day and age. We still want that. We want Jesus to justify our sin, our
vices, our greed, our exploitation of others, our idolatry of “being right” and
being hateful towards others. Justify, but not forgive, because in our minds
there is nothing to forgive. We’ve done nothing wrong. That’s one hand. The
other hand is we want him to condemn the sin of others, their vices, their
failings, their mistakes. Condemn, but not forgive, because in our minds those
people don’t deserve a single thing from God.
Jesus adamantly refuses to play this game with
us. And for that, we killed him.
Yes, we killed him. Not those people over there.
Us. The good people. The religious people. The righteous people. We’re the ones
who drove in the nails. Scholars have said that “if Jesus came back today, the
very first thing we’d do with him is crucify him again.” He’d again eat with
the modern equivalent of tax collectors and sinners (strippers and gay people,
perhaps?) He’d heal the sick when the political language of our times is “The
sick and poor are unworthy of life because they cost too much.” He’d tell
stories about the virtues of Muslims, atheists, and criminals, and he’d be very
harsh on how wrong we Christians have been about him, his Father, and our
neighbors. No, the really real Jesus is not much to our liking at all. We’d
kill him all over again.
And he’d let us do it too. He’d let us do it
because he loves us.
When God looks out over us, he sees a bunch of
squabbling fussing children. We’re fighting with each other. We’re whining over
things that don’t really matter. We’re ignoring everything he says to us. But
we’re his children. We’re his children and he loves us. No matter how messy,
how noisy, and how ugly we are.
My mother used to tell me in my teenage years
that “I will always love you, but I may not like you very much right now.”
We’ve all been there. We parents have all cleaned up more than our fair share
of our children’s poop, vomit, snot, and other disgusting bodily fluids. We’ve
all dealt with smart-alec attitudes, disrespect, and outright rebellion. We’ve
seen our kids do the stupidest things, put themselves in danger, get in trouble
for no good reason, and so forth. And yet, through it all, we have never once
stopped loving them. No matter how much they frustrate us, disgust us, or hurt
us, we cannot do it. They’re ours and they’re our whole world.
And God does with us as we do with our own and
then some. It is no linguistic trick of Jesus when he refers to God as Father.
God is our parent and he loves us with the same unbelievable power and passion
that we bear for our children. And nowhere do we see that more clearly than on
Easter.
For we have done the unthinkable. Our rebellion
against our loving parent had reached the point where we murdered him, hung him
on a cross, and let him rot. The ultimate statement of our crude defiance: We
killed God. Deicide. But God’s love will not be stopped even by that brutality.
On the third day, he rose again. Not even death could contain his love.
If we’d just be honest with ourselves for a
moment, we’d pretty quickly admit that we and our “siblings” are pretty much
the same as we are. And who are our siblings? Well, “those people,” however you
want to define them. Their evil is really no worse than our own and our good is
no better than theirs. This isn’t about how right and good we are and how wrong
and horrible they are. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all part of this same
family of flawed and sinful humanity. None of us is good enough to save
ourselves, but also none of us is bad enough for God to not care.
Easter is about love. A love that transcends
human categories and limitations. A love that transcends even human
understanding. It’s a love that brought Jesus to this world to be murdered by
the very people he came to save and it was that same love that brought him
forth from that tomb alive a few days later. It’s a love that began at the
beginning of time and it’s a love that will continue without failing into the
future. And it is that love that will bring all of us from death to life just
as it did Jesus. Amen.
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