I suspect that none of us expected the western world to change as it has following the inauguration of the new administration in the USA in January, writes Rev Sydney Maitland.
As weeks went by however, more and more of our easy assumptions were challenged and some were swept away. One newspaper columnist thought that this would make us have another look at the civil and political assumptions that underlie our way of life and maybe this is not such a bad thing.
Perhaps he is right and that it is good to be shaken out our comfortable complacencies. It definitely makes us have another look at our priorities and loyalties. But then we might have become just too comfortable with a set of assumptions that had just grown out of date.
But then have a look at Jesus’ resurrection. At first it was barely noticed – except by His closest disciples and adherents. They had to be moved from cowering in the locked Upper Room to a place of confident proclamation of the resurrection and lordship of Jesus Christ. That definitely upset the ruling authorities whose first response was to try to suppress the new movement.
In our day, there is a different challenge. I once asked why Easter Sunday had nothing special to mark it out – and was told that every Sunday was an Easter Day. So that meant than Easter Day was just as routine as any other Sunday. Somehow, I was not convinced.
So we need to start again. The first thing about Jesus’ resurrection was His defeat of death – or rather, the fear of death. Death itself would continue but our attitude to it would change. No longer such a fear of the unknown, and more a trust in the mercy of the Lord as we come into His deeper and more intimate presence. It is almost like a ship approaching its destination – a port that it had not visited before. It has the charts and sailing directions, and is able to radio the harbourmaster. But those last few hundred yards into an unknown and unvisited berth are still taken with care and some concern at just what lies before it.
But then there is that overriding knowledge of sins forgiven and stripped of their power to condemn. We are given a new freedom to acknowledge them before God, to ask His forgiveness and strength to resist the temptations to repeat them. Our sins become our attempts at a moral license which we know is false and which we know that we need to renounce, and this can take some time.
Next, there are new relationships within the fellowship of faith. New levels of understanding and new assumptions about life and the future. New forms of guidance, encouragement and authority. New experiences of love – and a love that always seeks the other person’s benefit rather than our own.
Worship becomes the corporate act of engagement with God while prayer and study become our personal space before God. Again, there are new ways of expressing these things. Performance and entertainment give way to celebration and adoration.
Little by little our experience of the resurrection of Jesus leads us into a new kind of life. We see things we had never noticed and we understand things that had never occurred to us. They only become obvious as we look back. Unperceived truths are opened up to us and unheard harmonies become living realities.
And yes, little by little the easy assumptions that had directed our lives and priorities, our relationships and transactions come to be studied a little more closely, defined more accurately, lived more carefully. What was obvious becomes less certain while what was only vague and confused gain definition and depth.
The resurrection of Jesus happened some 2000 years ago but its reality is there for each of us to receive and to live in a new way. And yes, it is far more revolutionary and far more searching than a change of regime in another country, another city or even in our own.
Every blessing this Eastertide.
Sydney Maitland
