We are in the season of Eastertide, these fifty days that stretch out from Easter to Pentecost. Here we are to remember that it is the God of resurrection who rolls away the stones blocking the exits from our deadened ways of life. It is the Spirit that beckons us forward into new possibilities and hope. It is the God of new life that breaks the chains that have held us in worn-out places full of fear. Our resurrected God topples the mazes of self-justification through which we have been wandering, allowing us to stand in the open space of God’s grace, which makes all things new and in which we are freed from our old life of disordered attachments.
While we give lip-service to welcoming this new life, this fresh start of which we had been dreaming, we must acknowledge that we are often filled with fear and dread at the prospect of living this life which is not of our ego’s making. Letting our over-controlling be exposed to the Spirit’s light is a challenge to our old “safe” ways of living. We may need to confess that part of us that had begun to love the little unconscious patterns of hidden privilege, unnamed prejudices, and unexposed secrets and lies that helped us float through our days.
The new life to which we have been released reveals that our scapegoating of “those others” must be discarded. We are all members of the same body of the risen Christ. We do belong to one another! The scales fall from our eyes and we see the very ones we were trying to get rid of surprise us by being the ones who may lead us into a renewed life, inviting us to build on firm foundations of truth. Here our interactions are grounded in justice, mutual service, and love. We are surprised to find in our family of God those who had been excluded from most of our comfortable, privileged ways of living. As William Sloan Coffin reminds us, “if we take seriously Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats from Matthew 25, in which it is revealed that ‘what we do to the least of those in our world, we do to Christ’, we see that no one gets into heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.”
The new community to which we are called this Eastertide is one grounded in commitments to reciprocal care and mutual love. We are released from our judgmental ways grounded in our self-justification of earned goodness and deserved rewards. We are led back to that scene of foot washing in the upper room, where Jesus demonstrates the mutual service of loving one another without regard for human rank and status. My soul rejoices in this new life, my ego may be hesitant.
In this new life, we are rooted in Gods grace, releasing us into the unconditional love of our Creator. We are opened to a new life we had never expected, where we are invited to experience vulnerabilities as strengths, perceived losses as gains, loving one another as the only thing that makes sense anymore, having seen the sting of death lose its power over us. Here we are invited to sing together and live out the lyrics of the familiar song: “Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Released from hatred, we learn anew the ways of love! Thanks be to God!