Moabites need not apply, all foreigners are unwelcome, and in our time, Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and Daoists and Sikhs and Jains and on and on are left on the outside of our sanctuaries, not only uninvited but ultimately not really and fully welcome to join our singular grasp on the truth of things: namely, without Jesus you are nothing at all. And the fact that none of these is really interested in joining us makes it all too clear that they are wrong, mistaken, then doomed, damned. And that is why I am deeply troubled at Easter.
How arrogant can we finally be to suggest, to proclaim, to shout that Jesus is "God's only son, our Lord," and dare to thunder that "no one, no one comes to the father, to God, without him"? That to me is the dirty and very large secret about Easter; it is only for us, we Christians, we few, we happy few. I think that is why I yearn for the sky and the squirrels rather than the lilies in a row, the white robes, the gleaming trumpets, and the loud songs inside the church. All of that smacks to me of hubris, of overweaning pride, of appalling ideas of superiority and specialness, of a smug certainty that we are right, and the remainder of humanity has plainly got the meaning of things all wrong.
I know well how grim all this sounds on a day of joy and gladness. Yet, I find myself here on Easter, and when I read of ISIS/ISIL acting in ways too disgusting to imagine against those who will not see the world as they do, I wonder just how far we Christians are from such beliefs, demanding that our construal of God in Jesus is the only construal possible? As I often am, I find myself considering Genesis 12:3 at times like these. Here we find the choice of Abram/Abraham by YHWH and given his charge as YHWH's agent in the world. "And in you, through you, all the nations of the world, all the peoples of the soil, will be blessed."
Do we Christians, who claim descent from this same Abraham, actually seek to bless all nations? Do we only understand our blessing task to make them like us? Or can we live in our faith in such a way that their faith, their ways of being, are honored and received and, more than merely accepted, seen as valuable and magnificent ways to see the world as made and sustained by God, a God whose names and ways are many and various and mysterious? I wish all a Happy Easter, but I further wish that the way of Easter may trouble you and move you to a richer appreciation of the ways of the God we celebrate, a God beyond our wildest imaginings, a God elusive and wonderful and astonishingly protean in our human sight.
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