Easter Sunday-and as it should be, its a beautiful day here in Shopping Mall USA.
Across the globe-where I aspire to be- the sun has already set on this holiest day in the Christian calendar.If Filipina maids who are driven by poverty to wage slavery in Hong Kong can go to mass with joy in their hearts-I too can do the same. And if you have ever watched the crowd come out of mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Hong Kong, many do.
I’ve never been one of those who was a biblical literalist. I’ve never accepted that every word written down in the Bible is exactly what transpired ever so long ago. I think that given the fact that most of the books in the Bible were decided some 300 years after the Crucifixion, the Bible hangs together most coherently when viewed from an allegorical perspective.
Nonetheless I do believe in the core essentials of the Book-and I also marvel at what the Easter story says about God, both for good and for not so good. Unlike Christopher Hitchens though- I don’t dismiss the whole thing as nonsensical simply because the Gospel is unfair. It is unfair-and as the priest pointed out at Mass today- its kind of hard to fathom that God will write off 2/3rds of humanity, a humanity he created, because of a spiritual technicality. But I’m not God. Just because one gets angry with the deal he sets up-does not mean that He does not exist.
And even for the “spiritual not religious”, having a day such as this that allows a few moments of reflection on the hope of man overcoming his smallness in the universe is probably a good thing.
Over at Slate, a man named David Plotz, blogged all the books of the Bible. He wrote extensively about all of them-which is particularly interesting since as an agnostic Jew, he “began the Bible as a hopeful, but indifferent, agnostic. [He] wished for a God, but [he] didn’t really care. He leave[s] the Bible as a hopeless and angry agnostic- brokenhearted about God.”
I like his final conclusion in the article:
As I read the book, I realized that the Bible’s greatest heroes—or, at least, my greatest heroes—are not those who are most faithful, but those who are most contentious and doubtful: Moses negotiating with God at the burning bush, Gideon demanding divine proof before going to war, Job questioning God’s own justice, Abraham demanding that God be merciful to the innocent of Sodom. They challenge God for his capriciousness, and demand justice, order, and morality, even when God refuses to provide them. Reading the Bible has given me a chance to start an argument with God about the most important questions there are, an argument that can last a lifetime.
Like it-but have no desire to follow him in the argument however. I’ll stick with Chapter 10 and 11 of Ecclesiastes, “The light of the sun is sweet, sweet, sweet. Enjoy it now, while you can, for “youth and black hair are fleeting.”. And part of that joy is knowing that God created that same sun-for some purpose we do not yet know. However Easter reminds us that He is there still.
Happy Easter.
Great post Skippy. Concur with your thoughts. To many of the inerrancy crowd forget what the Nazarene taught. Agape, forgiveness, justice and equality.