Moving Towards Easter

The Journey through Lent is suppose to prepare us for Easter. Easter is the celebration, it seems to me, of the reality that the love of others which sacrifices self for the good of others triumphs over the evil of the selfishness of other powers. The love of Jesus for humanity, the willingness of Jesus to lay down his life, it was not taken from him, is vindicated by God's raising him from the dead. It is this reality that is to shape our own lives and actions.

Jesus said it was better to lose our lives in service than to gain the whole world. The Golden rule is to love others as much as we love ourselves. That what we want for ourselves is what we want for others. That continues to be a kind of dividing line for all of us.

There are those who struggle with their own selfishness and seek to the power and faith to work and hope for others the same kind of life they want for themselves. There are others who only want what they want for themselves. There are some who keep praying for the power to die to themselves, to sacrifice some of their ambition to make room for the ambition of others, to take some of their plenty ands give to some who have nothing.

There are others who have who only want more. There are some who think that those who are strong deserve to take from those who are weak. There are some who have many advantages who have no interest in surrendering those advantages for the welfare of others.

Easter does demand a great leap of faith to believe that those who sacrifice, those who die for the betterment of others, those who give what they have to those who do not have, are the ones who will arise in new life, are the blessed ones. When you look at the world around us, it seems obvious that only a miracle of resurrection could over come those powers of selfishness.