Shortly before he was assassinated, Oscar Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of El Salvador, said, “I do not believe in death without resurrection. If I am killed, I shall arise in the people of El Salvador!”
Romero’s spirit lived on in the resurrection power of his people, continuing his struggle for nonviolence and economic justice.
Romero himself lived in the spirit of the resurrection of Jesus. Everyone who embraces the spirit of compassion and love lives in that resurrection power.
Compassion and love are stronger than mere power or violence. That is the message of Easter. Love is stronger than death.
The story of Jesus is the story of a human being who lived a life completely centered in loving compassion. For Christians and non-Christians alike, Jesus is an honored model of authentic living. Christians say that Jesus reveals the very personality and character of God. When we see Jesus loving all - neighbor, outcast, unclean, alien and enemy - we say that is how God is. God is love.
In the story of Jesus, we also see how humanity reacts to the demands of love. We can’t handle radical love. We have our own self-centered agendas - agendas of power, prestige and pride. Pure love exposesour falsehoods.
The late Reinhold Niebuhr was fond of reminding us that pride and moral blindness is universal among humans. He also said that the morality of groups, especially nations, is even worse than the morality of individuals. It is more diffcult for our human conscience to function well in groups. An organization is less free to self-correct its morality than an individual is. The self-interested righteousness of a group, driven by its structures of power, is even more extreme than mere individual hubris.
Jesus wasn’t killed by individual sins alone. Jesus was executed by the state as a rebellious traitor. He was condemned by religious authorities as a blasphemer and heretic. He was damned by the mob. The system killed Jesus.
Groups have destructive tendencies far greater than individuals. Even the lone right-wing sharpshooter who murdered Oscar Romero acted in the spirit of a group mentality, doing something his individual consciencenever would have permitted.
Maybe that’s why most of the images of salvation in the scripture are social.
We yearn for the day when “nations will study peace, and nature will be miraculously fruitful. The lion and the lamb will nuzzle; children and serpents will play together; weapons will be beaten into farm machinery; poor people will see free justice; and all humanity will gleefully feast on the mountain of the Lord (Isa. 2:1-4; 11:4, 6-9; 25:6) … Do not the Beatitudes speak of the poor and of peacemakers and of those who thirst for social righteousness? As forthe final vision of God, a new society filled with light and life and the Lamb enthroned.
Salvation must be worldsized or not at all” (David G. Buttrick, “The Mystery and the Passion,” page 213).
So those of us who work for the reform of social structures are proclaiming God’s salvation and living in the power of resurrection.
When we demand that social structures become more loving and compassionate, more gentle and accepting, we take up the ancient cause of justice. That demand is a confrontation with the powers and principalities, the groups that manufacturedeath in all of its many disguises.
Christians believe that love is God’s agenda because love is Jesus’ agenda. In hope, we act under the conviction that love is the highest value and the greatest power in the universe.
The social expression of love is justice, especially social and economic justice.
Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. often repeated the Unitarian pastor and abolitionist Theodore Parker’s famous expression of hope: “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Our Easter hope is thatGod’s love is continually bringing life out of death.
That’s what God does best.
God takes what is broken, discarded, lost and hopeless, and God raises it up.
Life lived in the spirit of resurrection is life expressed as love and compassion in our personal world, and as justice and peacemaking in our corporate world. It is a challenging calling, but there is cause for hope. Easter is our Christian celebration of hope that, in the end, love triumphs.
LOWELL GRISHAM IS AN EPISCOPAL PRIEST WHO LIVES IN FAYETTEVILLE.
Opinion, Pages 13 on 04/08/2012