Do we really believe this profound truth? Do we live our lives as if the good news were really true? If not, then we are still waiting to be claimed fully by God in Christ, and to appropriate the gift of the Holy Spirit promised and given in baptism.
Part of the reason the church of which we are a part has ceased to preach the good news with conviction is that we have been seduced, like most North Americans and Western Europeans, into believing that life is sustained by human will and activity rather than by the constant upholding power of the living God. Our world has closed in upon itself. In our mind’s eye, today’s world is far smaller than it was for most of our ancestors.
Despite the fact that we reach for the stars and dream of interplanetary travel and have an ever more accurate picture of the shape and form of the universe, our lives are focused more and more on the moment, without reference to Eternity.
We have lost a sense of the grandeur of God’s vast and magnificent Creation, described so simply, yet so profoundly — in almost childlike language by the Psalmist — and of the place of the human in that creation.
Moreover, we have forgotten the Fall, however we explain it — the brutal fact that the human apart from God is helpless and without hope. We no longer speak of sin. A sign of the times is the dropping of the public confession of sin and assurance of pardon from the liturgies in some of our churches. Has the church become just another therapeutic society among many, human creations designed to massage and to patch up the wounded, without reference to the transcendent realm? We hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Far from overdramatizing the power of evil in the world, which has characterized some periods of church history, we simply have stopped talking about it at all.
Wherever this theological condition exists — no evil, no repentence, no absolution ó then the gospel ceases to have any relevance to life. Life is good and potentially can get much better through human science and engineering; the human is the measure of all things; God, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, is moved from the center to the edge of life, where God can be watched, controlled, domesticated, put into human service.
But God will not have it. God did not send the beloved Son to die for the Other simply to allow the human enterprise to be freed to follow its own path, toward the ends of its own choosing. The crucifixion was the only means of salvaging the human enterprise. Resurrection was the only means of vindicating the One who perfectly embodies God’s will for us individually and in community, one with another.
And so we Presbyterian Christians find ourselves generally in a state of confusion, twisting slowly in the wind, without a compelling message, without a life-and-death reason to exist. We’re not alone. Much of Western Christianity is dead in the water, reduced to empty forms, lifeless husks, neither hot nor cold, simply drifting through time and space like burned-out comets.
Easter Day is the day when we stop, look and listen, for God’s word, God’s message, God’s blinding revelation to God’s people here and now. But for the costly sacrifice of the Son, our sin would not be forgiven; but for the resurrection, sin, death and the power of evil would still reign supreme.
On the other hand, because of the power of the atoning death, and because of the victory wrought by the resurrection, literally, the beginning of the New Creation whose end is the New Heaven and the New Earth, has begun.
Without the divine reality of redemption and the gospel that proclaims it, we have no hope, no reason for being. Life is but vanity of vanities.
We must, all of us, stand at the foot of the cross and enter anew into the pain suffered on our behalf. We must stand by the empty grave and marvel at the love and faithfulness of the Sovereign God who never gave up on us, and who will never give up on us — or Christ’s church — until every member of the human family has opportunity to repent, to believe, to rejoice and to live for ever and ever with the living, reigning God and all God’s saints.
We must, all of us, living in the power of the resurrection, reach out to the Other, who is in fact the loving God who is always coming to meet us with a promise and a gift.
Now to him who by the power at
work within us is able to accomplish
far more than all we can ask or
imagine, to him be glory in the church
and in Christ Jesus to all generations,
forever and ever. Amen.
Ephesians 3:20-21
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