The Unconfined Promise of Easter

There’s a fair amount of religious thought—and no small amount of anti-Christian thought—that would like to see the commemoration of Easter confined to the four walls of the church building; the lessons of Easter confined to consideration of something designated as ‘the afterlife’; and the celebration of Easter confined to a spiritually and morally vacuous “spring holiday” during which children search for candy eggs.

No amount of this kind of thinking can contain the power of the promise, and the promise of the power, of Easter.

That power, and that promise, are right at the core of the idea of America, and the hateful determination to destroy the idea of America is cut from precisely the same cloth as the hateful determination to destroy Christ Jesus. That hateful determination was proven empty and powerless two millennia ago; it is empty and powerless today.

We’ve heard more than one recent commentator remind people that at pivotal points of American history—shots fired at Lexington; Washington crossing the Delaware; the onset of the Civil War; the confrontation of the Cold War—the human actors whose words and actions led to the eventual outcomes did not know at the time how these events would turn out. With the benefit of hindsight, we know. But they didn’t.

We would suggest that the question of what they knew deserves to be considered deeply and carefully. Because while it is of course true in a literal, objective way that they did not know the content and chronology of the future, they DID know in their heart of hearts that in acting on the side of America’s ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God, they were standing on the side of what is right and good and true. They felt it in their souls. They were standing on the lessons of Easter—and so they knew they were standing on the side of that which ultimately would prevail.

How so?

Easter is a revelation of Truth. Until the resurrection occurred—as the words attributed to Pontius Pilate remind us—there was no definitive and practical answer to the question, “What is Truth?” If there is no definitive answer to this question, there is no answer to the related sequence of questions: “what is good?”; “what is evil?”; “how do we know the difference between the two?”; and most important, “will good or evil prevail?”

Easter answered all of these questions. ‘The way, the truth and the life’ that Jesus taught and lived before the crucifixion was made clear and irreversible after the resurrection. Truth is always the victor; proving and re-proving this is the work of time.

Now, modern thought would like to tell us that it’s a huge, illogical and untenable stretch to go from this tired old Bible stuff to the challenges facing America and the world in 2010. But the parallel is as plain as day.

Starting with the birth of Jesus, which so rattled Herod’s sense of authority that he ordered all male children under a certain age to be killed, and continuing through Jesus’ teaching of the need to worship God ‘in spirit and in truth’, Jesus’ mission and message spoke of an altogether different kingdom that was both out of the reach of human kings, and at the same time, “at hand”. He spoke of the truth that made men free; that made life more abundant; that fulfilled the highest sense of law.

The elders, the scribes, the Pharisees—they all represented a quality of thinking that fiercely opposes any threat to the way things are, especially when that threat speaks of freedom to the individual human heart, and emanates from an unseen source they cannot control and seems in fact to defy their attempts at control. So they had to flex their authority, take hold of the threat they could see—the human Jesus—and get rid of it.

This process of getting rid of Jesus was wrapped in the label of ‘law’ and approved by those in authority. But it all proved to be illusory authority attempting to protect a process that was manifestly lawless. The result was that they not only didn’t get rid of Jesus; they assured his influence was magnified and made permanent among humankind. Nobody today knows or cares who were the elders, scribes or Pharisees, but just about everybody today has heard of Jesus, and his teaching and example continues to transform human lives for the better, every day.

The birth of America—with its God-given ethos of liberty, self-government and self-reliance replacing servitude to all-powerful human kings—surely upset King George. He tried to get rid of it; used something labeled “law” to do it, and when that failed, resorted to violence. He failed, and made America stronger. More recently, the aggressive assertion of all-powerful human authority, whether of imperial Japan through Hirohito, Nazi Germany through Hitler, or the Soviet Union under its godless communist ‘rulers’, has tried to rule the world and in the process destroy America.

Make no mistake: however much the secular professor may wish to restate these conflicts in terms of political strategies or economic objectives or even ego conflicts, and regardless of any attempt to spin what was at stake down to something closer to morally equivalent policy differences, the real war was the fight to preserve the right of humanity to live under and follow the ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God.

This is a never-ending war, but a war worth fighting, because it is a war to preserve a hope in humanity that we are something better than matter-defined animals governed by bigger, matter-defined animals.

In the America of 2010, the war is raging again. Though the actors have new names—Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Holder, Soros, Emanuel, Axelrod and the like—the real enemy and the real evil is the same as it has always been: the human hatred of the idea of the presence and power of unseen and uncontrollable Truth; and the progeny of that hatred, which is the determination to destroy the American ideal of individual freedom and responsibility under God.

Today’s actors, like their predecessors in history, will scoff at such an ‘extremist’ characterization of their views. They are skilled in propaganda techniques; they are Alinsky-trained in the method of using words that sound like truth to demonize that which stands for Truth. They are, for example, just trying to assure healthcare for those who can’t afford it, or just trying to protect the planet from those who would destroy it. And they’re propping up that trusty label of ‘law’ and ‘executive order’ to do it—so it must be legitimate, right?

BS. Don’t be distracted by a dissection and discussion of the pleasant or unpleasant personalities of these actors. Personalities are an irrelevant sideshow; their thinking is what matters. They will define what health is or is not; they will decide who is worthy or life and who is not; they will appropriate and apportion wealth as they see fit to whom they see fit. This thinking is out to overthrow America; to wipe out her founding ideals and her God, and replace them with their modern, elitist, godless, dressed-up version of a very old concept: human-directed, matter-is-everything totalitarianism.

The American heroes of today—including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and many others, and most assuredly including the millions of American tea partiers—like their predecessors in history, know that the war is on, and that they must join in the fight without literally knowing how it will come out. But in the same, deeper sense we wrote of earlier, we all DO know how it will come out. We all DO know the ideal of America is God-given, right and true. We all DO know Truth exists and will prevail.

This is the unconfined promise of Easter.

Paul Gable

April 4, 2010 (Easter Sunday)