Easter Greetings 2023

As Easter bursts upon us in 2023, the most important things we need to hear are that God loves us, and that with his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ has already overcome “the world,” with its seemingly intractable tribulations.

There’s been a lot of emphasis by preachers and teachers recently on what Christians need to be doing.  The emphasis is good and useful, of course.

But Easter is the best day in the entire liturgical year to remember that what we do is an acknowledgment not that we are somehow bigger than the titanic problems stalking the earth today, but that God is.

The litany of alarming concerns is a long one.  It’s easy to be discouraged by the growing list.  The America we have counted on as a haven of lawfulness and sufficiency is under severe attack.  Unlawfulness is breaking out in a way no living person has ever seen in the United States.  This is not like the 1970s, as some have suggested.  In the cynical, overt, unapologetic turn of government and the leadership of political parties away from lawfulness and accountability, it is far worse.  It’s sui generis.

The legacy media, the ones that still have the loudest megaphone, bring us propaganda stories about our situation and passing events.  They seek to vilify some groups of people and establish others as perpetual victims.

It’s difficult for the public to perceive what’s really going on, whether the subject is social conditions, economic and financial developments, or national security.  Many of us probably think it’s worse than it is.  Some, on the other hand, aren’t experiencing how bad it is for others, and are dismissive about the worsening conditions.  Many think some of the people whom they don’t interact with much “hate” them, and are constantly attacking everyone else – even thought the actual evidence of that doesn’t exist, much less get reported.

Our president himself routinely posts social media statements that are demonstrably untrue.  His administration contradicts itself several times a week on crucial policy issues.  There are numerous things the people aren’t told; things that aren’t national security secrets, but would be unpopular, even appalling if the people knew about them.

Threats mount from abroad, threats to our allies and to us.  The current administration shows repeated weakness.  It won’t defend our own borders, much less the security perimeter painstakingly cultivated since World War II.  That perimeter has kept a larger peace for nearly 80 years, but it is weakening by the day.

Threats mount that are global and insidious, chiefly digitization of knowledge and communication, economic as well as intellectual, that proposes to bind us and extort us through central controls.

Our social issues are evidence of a terrible spiritual crisis.  Far worse than in the 1970s, they have been induced out of a situation that, especially in terms of race and ethnicity, was rapidly improving for at least 40 years.  America went through many decades of ethnic and racial division, different ethnic groups often heading to the frontier to get away from inter-ethnic prejudice in the eastern cities (e.g., various immigrants versus their Irish, Italian, and East European counterparts), and Southern black people heading north and west to escape “Jim Crow” limitations on their rights, opportunities, and dignity.

But so much of that was behind us.  Then our schools themselves began to teach younger generations to suspect, fear, and hate each other:  not in single, situational narratives, but on principle, across the board.

The principle has been enlarged to proclaim a non-existent plague of “hatred” now against people whose identities, as proclaimed by activists and enshrined in public narratives, lead with their gender confusion, sexual practices, and determination to instill their divisive, corrosive ideas in the minds of children.  The activists are small in number, but outsized in impact.  They are having the same impact on the rule of law as the practice of weaponizing government against political opponents has, and the relentless determination to vitiate the very meaning of nationhood.

This is not your father’s social crisis.  It isn’t the 1970s; it exceeds even the most prescient prophecies of observers from that decade.

We have a lot of problems, all worsening at once.  You may be asking wearily at this point why I am recounting them, even at tip-of-the-iceberg level, for Easter Sunday.

It’s because God is bigger than all these things.

These ARE the things God is bigger than.

When Jesus said in John 16:33, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world,” these are the things he meant he had overcome.

Yes, there are numerous lesser things we can already attest that he has overcome.  We tend to imagine that God limits His use of power to overcoming those lesser things; we forget that to take the gospel to all the earth, He had to use His power on much bigger ones, the kind of problems we face today.

This is good news, meanwhile:  we know from our experience with those things, both lesser and greater, that the meaning of Jesus’s overcoming is not that there will be no trouble.  It doesn’t mean the “overcome” things will never appear.  It means that when they do appear, the creation power and the limitless love of the Father are made available to us through the triumph of the risen Christ.

Only God knows the hour He has appointed to move to conclusive events as the prophecies of Isaiah, Daniel, and John in the Revelation have advised us, regarding what we call the End Times.  Jesus said even he doesn’t know.  It could be tomorrow.

But we are selling God way short if we believe that we know, on the basis of assuming that our problems are too big for God to work His power on.

They aren’t.

The Easter message of 2023 is to ponder that.  Ponder who God is, and what Jesus has done for us.  I believe we have become complacent in our modern self-sufficiency, and don’t even consider that God’s power is still far above anything we can readily imagine.  Do we think that His power extends only to making today’s rules for living work for us?  That if there’s a concerted attack on the conditions for those rules for living, there’s nothing God can or will do about it?

Do we imagine our only options are to push or merely defend in the temporal realm of politics, as if politics and its recurring rules have the final say?  Do we actually think God’s promise of hope and a future is limited by what we can imagine or do?  Who do we say the LORD God of Hosts is?  Who do we say Jesus is?

What if the problem is what is manifestly the case:  that we haven’t been asking Him for His help in all the things we can’t organize, purpose, or have the vision and wisdom to do in our own power?  What if the problem is that our eyes are not on Him but on the things we think we can control, or at least influence?

Rather than argue the point further, I suggest only that each person ponder these things.  See if the Bible describes to you a God of small favors and small intentions.  2 Chronicles 16:9 says, “For the eyes of Jehovah run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him.”  It starts with God’s love and intentions.

2 Chronicles 7:14 says, “if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”  It requires our belief and appeal and participation.

1 John 5 says, “this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith.” (verses 3-4)  And “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us—whatever we ask—we know that we have what we asked of him.” (verses 14-15)

Where has God set limits on what He will do for us?

Easter Sunday certainly doesn’t speak to us of such a thing.  Every problem, sin, alarm, and terror we face today was nailed to that cross 2,000 years ago.

For this year’s inspiration, perhaps the greatest musical celebration ever composed of the triumph of the Savior.

Let’s have an encore, from Ghana.

And for my American countrymen and women, let’s bring it home.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Feature image:  Public domain images; author.