Dear HUM friends,
On Easter morning we rise to the promise of new life. The tomb is empty! He has risen!
March 23 represents the heart of our faith. When Jesus took on our humanity—our sinful and temporal nature—he made the ultimate sacrifice for you and me. He willingly went to the cross and died. Why? He surely could have taken the advice of his disciples to turn away from Jerusalem and make a hasty retreat. They knew he would be walking in to his own death.
God came to us in this way to show his unlimited love for you and me. More importantly, he went to the cross for those who are unlike you and me—the ones we don’t like, the chaff of the earth, the despised, the rejected, the poor, the forgotten, the children, the ones who behave differently from us. As soon as you make a judgment against a brother or sister, another child of God, that’s the moment you need God’s grace and forgiveness most. We are blinded to Jesus’ message … that God loves most those whom you and I love least. Isn’t that amazing? How can it be? Are we living in so much darkness and fear that we cannot see that Light?
Andre Gide, the twentieth century French novelist, playwright, essayist, diarist, wrote in 1919 a short meditation on Christianity and the dangers of “the free interpretation of the Scriptures” entitled “The Pastoral Symphony” (Two Symphonies New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931), which was later adapted into a three-act play and motion picture. It revolves around a beautiful young woman named Gertrude, blind from birth, and a devout Swiss minister, who rescues her from a hovel and guides her from darkness into light. And yet the light is blinding, more blinding than her blindness. When surgery suddenly enables her to see, two things awaken her soul with crushing pain. One is that “my eyes opened on a world more beautiful than I had ever dreamt it could be; … the daylight so bright, the air so brilliant, the sky so vast.”
The other thing that struck her powerfully, and that precipitated her death, was the way people’s faces were “so full of care,” pain and emptiness. She almost wishes that her eyes had never been opened by the miracle.
Easter is the great miracle of our lives. The miracle of resurrection is puzzled over, written about, debated endlessly among scholars and the ignorant. Yet, we know that what happened at Golgotha, what happened on that cross, what happened in that tomb … are all part of a Mystery beyond explanation.
When Jesus took on new life beyond the grave, he showed us that it is possible for you and me to have our eyes opened to the blazing light of God’s amazing Grace. He loves us. He wants us to love him. And the consequence of loving God is that we are called to love those whom he loves—the arrogant, the judgmental, the despised, the lonely, the forgotten, the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick, the oppressed, the destitute, the least of these.
May God touch each of our eyes at Easter, that we may see what we want to avoid and ignore, the pain and suffering of our brothers and sisters wherever they may be in our neighborhood and in our world … and the brilliant Light that is with us.
Halleluia! Christ is risen, dwelling among us in many forms!
Pastor Ron
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Howland United Methodist Church