“No More!” An Eastertide Meditation, An Addendum

Subtitle: Nevertheless…

An Apologia: Eastertide or the Great 50 Days, running from Easter Day (this year, April 17) to the Day of Pentecost (this year, falling on June 5), grants an opportunity for a deeper dive into the mystery of the Christian claim of the resurrection of Jesus.

“No more!” We may cry. “No more!” We may speak and act to alleviate (if not eliminate) the ills of the cultural and social, genderal, ethnic and racial, and ideological -isms of this life in this world.

Nevertheless, if human history bears any enduring, transmissible lesson, it is that there are no generational cures for evil. What we have seen before, we shall see again. For embedded in the human heart, in both individual and communal manifestations, is an inherent self-interest and will to power that ever seeks to demonize (and succeeds in demonizing as a prelude to destroying) “the other”.

Nevertheless, I continue to cry, “No more!” For there is something greater that serves as a counterbalance to our (and my share in the) human condition of self-interest and the will to power…

God.

And, perhaps surprisingly (even to me!), it is not my belief in some supposed Divine reward for good and retribution for bad. (For history’s testimony that the good, the godly often suffer and the wicked often prosper long ago drove a dividing wedge between my trusting assurance in doctrine and the demonstrably repeatable reality of my experience!)

Rather it is my faith in God and my love of God that summons me to hope in God.

Hope.

Not my wishful thinking that things will get better. Rather my surrender to the God of love and justice that Jesus reveals, which grants me the courage and the confidence to live and move and have my being in love and with justice, unconditional benevolence and fairness toward all as if the triumph of good has happened.

Thus, I sing with the psalmist:

For you, O Lord, are my hope,

my trust, O Lord, from my youth.

I have been sustained by you ever since I was born;

from my mother’s womb you have been my strength;

my praise shall be always of you.[1]

© 2022 PRA

Illustration: Resurrection (1896), James Tissot (1836-1902)

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[1] Psalm 71.5-6