The Easter post

When major holidays arrive each year, my reflections on them take on tones peculiar to the way my life and the world have been proceeding lately.

This year, Holy Week has had me thinking about the phenomenon of mockery.  We often talk about the physical suffering Christ endured on Good Friday - and for good reason; what he was subjected to you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy - but it's important to remember the mockery aspect of his ordeal as well.  The "King of the Jews" inscription on his crown of thorns, the taunts of "save yourself!", the sponge full of vinegar on the hyssop branch - all designed to eat at a person's sense that his very existence has any purpose.

I've sometimes envisioned Jesus flinging the cross off his back on his way up the hill, standing tall and telling the crowd and the Roman soldiers, "All you people f--- off!  I haven't done anything wrong and I'm not going to take this!"  That certainly would have been in keeping with - what's the term? human nature - but that would have indeed confirmed the mockers' real message - that his existence was worthless.

America is pretty much characterized by mockery now.  Conventions, institutions, norms of personal interaction, and values that were commonly held until quite recently are now the object of scorn.  For insisting that up is up and not down, that 2 plus 2 equals 4 and not 5, a modern American gets ridiculed and ostracized.  Those who have usurped the cultural narrative have convinced a critical mass of the populace that the age-old definition of the most basic human relationship can and must be jettisoned.  They have convinced far too many of us that there is some compelling reason not to avail ourselves of the vast reserves of fossil fuel present all over our continent.  They have decreed that an attitude of nonchalance about overwhelming debt is the only acceptable reaction to it.

Most pertinent to the point of this day, they have declared that the overarching theme of the Holy Bible, from a certain tribal people in the Middle East being selected by the Creator of the universe to receive His commandments about how to live in a way that pleases Him, through the travails that people suffers for straying from that, to the wave of prophets he imbues with the gift of uttering his pronouncements, to begetting a son among them who, after a prophetic ministry, must die a ghastly death - replete with the most degrading mockery - in order to rise again three days later and prove that he had overcome the world, has been fabricated by mere mortals, either out of fearful superstition, or as a means of wielding power.

We are told to react to the story that, above all others in human history should make us weep and purge our hearts of hardness, with cynicism.

Easter is your chance - my chance - to reject that cynicism, to invite real faith back into your - my - heart, faith that the only human being who ever lived who did not have an earthly father walked out of that tomb that Sunday morning in perfect health and vitality and went into town to have some breakfast with his friends, and then command them to bear witness to who He was - is - and then to reassure them - us - that he is with us as long as there is space and time, at which point a Counselor will look into each of our hearts to see what kind of eternity we have prepared ourselves for.