FROM THE BOUNDARY
Easter Day, the Sunday of the Resurrection – tomorrow it will be a memory. Yet the reality is it never really leaves us, for suffering, death and resurrection never leave us. The people of France know this very well, and we send our blessings to them. If what happened to Jesus at Calvary, in the tomb and out of it, has no parallel in our own lives, then the whole thing is unreal. Jesus would have spoken at us, yes, but not to us, or through us, or in us. Calvary would have been no better than a fairy tale and so, for that matter, would our lives be too. For suffering is as much a part of life as joy and happiness, all the aging, sickness, death, loss, grief, despair – the whole bandwagon. There’s no escape. We can’t build walls around ourselves to stop it.
Sure, we bring much of it upon ourselves with all our grasping and clinging. In confronting a society rooted in rule books and narrow mindedness to show us the Law of Life which is Love, Jesus knew the risks and paid the price. So do all those who stand against the crowd in the name of justice and truth; and down the Christian centuries many have walked that way. There can be no finer thing than to die that others might live. Few of us are that fortunate.
But what of God in life’s fandango? There are some Christians who say that if we’re OK with ‘Him’ and pay our dues we shall have health and prosperity. God dispenses the good things. Some say that if we sin, we shall suffer – God exacts a penalty. Yet there are those who live a relatively ‘fun’ life without major incident who don’t give a fig for God, and righteous men who succumb prematurely to disease and death. So the idea of a God of rewards and punishments doesn’t seem to work. By and large, He appears just to let us get on with it. He’s neither a “cosmic sadist”, nor Father Christmas. And in our commonsense way, we know that the rain, like the Tower of Siloam, falls on the just and the unjust, and that natural disasters are prone to hit us all. As they say it’s a “profound mystery” – which is usually a cover for saying ‘We simply don’t know’. Well, nobody does.
Does that mean that God is irrelevant to our lives? Is it all a matter of chance, a lottery? Is there any purpose to suffering?
Imagine, for a moment, being in heaven. Do the concepts of good and bad, virtue and vice, pain and pleasure, have any meaning there? How could they? There’s only ‘God-ness’ isn’t there, Life there, Love there? God IS Love. And that Spirit of Life, that Love, and its power, its manifestations – creativity, compassion, joy, understanding, nurturing, sustaining, carrying – fill our world and rest in every human heart if only we knew it. It’s in that sense that we can speak of God being ‘with us’, the Spirit of Life inseparable from the Spirit of Man, inseparable from the good things which happen to us and even the bad. That ‘God-ness’ never leaves us.
So it is that even in our suffering, the Spirit of Life, ‘God-ness’, ‘speaks’ to us. Indeed, it may be through suffering that we first hear it, that in suffering we become whole people not half-people, that suffering may well be the key to Life. It follows that God is as much a God of the bad things as the good. Love never dies.
In suffering we’re joined with Christ crucified in his suffering for Love’s sake. And even if there’s no cross for us, we can unite our lives in other ways, by simply offering whatever comes our way in the name of love to Love itself, the very breath of our breath. Oh if only we knew that Love’s home is within us, that it transcends every coming in and going out.
So yes, when the pain comes, the bad things, we have the power to confront it, to wrestle with it like Jacob at Peniel. We’ll learn that we have reserves of strength we never thought we had; yes, and insight, courage and compassion for ourselves. Our Spirit of Life, our indwelling Love, will kindle and we’ll begin to see, little by little, that what we thought was death-dealing has become life-giving. We may not know what’s going on. At first, there’ll be just little glimmers of hope through the pain. But one day, one day, we’ll know it’s over. And at that moment we shall have heard, as music on the wind, Christ’s call to tomorrow into a new wholeness, a new dignity, despite the thorns which have seared us. We’ll know the darkness as light, and say ‘I really wouldn’t have known what life really is, love really is, but for all that.’ Perhaps we’ll still not understand that it was the Spirit of Life, Love, which revealed itself, as it always will, in everything we are and can be.
So you see, the Easter experience never really leaves us, does it? It’s never a memory. How could it be? It’s the Spirit of Life, that Life which is Love, after all.
Go safely, then – until the next time.