Eternal life

Last week, we saw people celebrating in Baghdad. There are many in Baghdad, and beyond, who are not celebrating, to be sure -- those still mourning their loved ones. Whether the good of one outweighs the cost of the other I am in no position to judge. But the celebrations themselves are powerful.

They possess a quality, a joy deep and strong, against which even our most thrilling house parties pale and shrink. Their celebrations are real and their joy genuine. Yet there is a celebration that, every year, boasts of being greater than anything we've seen in Baghdad. This Sunday, the Christians will celebrate Easter, the most important holiday in their lives. To celebrate Easter is to recognize the new life of Jesus of Nazareth, a man who walked out of his grave and never went back. What is it that makes this holiday so great?

The Baghdad celebrants first bubbled over with their taste of freedom. Saddam Hussein, his omnipresent image leering at them from every street corner, had maintained a brutal rule of fear and oppression for over 25 years. The freedom Christians celebrate is from a fear far older. The fear is that the universe is silent, that we are alone. That uncertainty that plagues sleepless nights is dispelled by the certain birth of the man called Jesus. His claim is to be the very image of the invisible Almighty, the result of God entering human history as a painter might step into his painting. If the claim is true, then not only is the human race not alone, but its Creator is immanently interested in it. Such a God is not aloof, ruling by fear from some presidential palace.

Freedom from fear would mean little to the Iraqis if they did not also know that soon, the war would be over. The endless fighting of the past 20 years -- with Iran, the US, even within Iraq -- will be finished. We, who have never really known war, do not know what the joy from such a peace is like. We may catch a glimpse when a personal relationship, marred by betrayal, is restored by the breaking of the silent treatment.

True peace is not the absence of conflict but the ending of it. It is not a detached state of other-worldliness but the creation of friends out of enemies. The Christians proclaim such a peace for a conflict far larger than the Mideast -- our war with God.

Christianity does not, like a sales pitch, propose the solution to an imaginary problem of its own creation. Every culture in the world has said that our wars with each other reflect a deeper war within ourselves. The book of Genesis simply, correctly identifies the cause: every man, woman, and child finds themselves in a state of rebellion against their creator.

Some people imagine that the "original sin" had something to do with sex. That isn't true. The truth is that Adam and Eve were the world's first unilateralists. They could not bear to recognize anyone as having the right to authority over them, not even the One who gave them the free choice to rebel. So they went their own way. They rebelled against everything Good and dragged the world along with them.

Some people understand the state of "original sin" to be "being blamed for Adam's mistake." But no one can be blamed for their parent's faults, only their own. What we have inherited is their inclination to rebel. We prove that we are their children when we are told not to do something and our desire to do it only grows.

We've had no shortage of resolutions -- from a council of Moses and Muhammad, Buddha and Confucius -- calling us to love what is good and shun the perversion of the good. We've even made some resolutions ourselves. But we've failed to fully comply with any of them. We are in material breach with goodness, and so also with its source -- God. Christianity means nothing at all until this is understood. This is the humanitarian crisis that God invaded history to confront.

The cure for any rebel is surrender. But if our history has shown us anything it is that we cannot surrender. It never lasts. We wave the white flag and then start shooting again. So God, desiring to rescue us more than anything else, entered our world to do for us what we could not. As Jesus he surrendered in everything and died a rebel's death, so that the rebel in us might die. His true surrender can now be shared; anyone can partake who agrees that he needs to. This is what the Christians mean by "believing in Jesus."

Some Christians have done such a poor job explaining their message that "believe in Jesus" seems like one more moral injunction on the checklist, just like "don't gossip" or "give to the poor." This gives the impression that, of two people with equally exemplary records, one would be condemned for not sharing the other's beliefs.

But this is all quite backwards. It is not one's beliefs that actually put one in danger, but one's own unexemplary record. If I am driving in Europe, I can refuse to drive on the left side of the road and believe that I should not have to, but neither is going to prevent the Mack truck from hitting me on the right. I would be condemned, as it were, not for what I was thinking, but for what I was doing. But a change in my thinking could have taken me out of danger. Believing in Jesus is the solution to a danger that already exists.

Easter is the celebration of rescue from danger, peace at the frontlines with God. It can only be for, to put it very mildly, the unexemplary. Jesus made it quite clear that he had arrived to cure those who knew they were messed up, not those who thought they weren't. Believing, trusting in that cure or not is not a matter of being a good boy or a bad boy, but of becoming God's friend or remaining His enemy. It is not a choice between doing a good deed or a bad one, but between living and dying.

Living is the last and greatest cause to celebrate in Iraq. The Iraqis who once feared a midnight knock from the secret police are ready to live again. Easter celebrates that life and a new kind of life, the resurrected life of Jesus.

"Resurrection" literally means, "standing corpse." Does that sound embarrassingly crude? For many it does, who think it silly to wish for a life after death. Now if the Resurrection happened, it happened. If not, then not. I don't see the sense in polling for opinions when the question is of facts.

But ask anyone who's lost someone in this war if it's so silly. Only someone who knows the horror of death can understand the horror of no real life after death. People have always tried to make the Jesus of Easter out to be a ghost, as if that were somehow more respectable. But the initial report has always been the same: He's back, body and all. Not as a zombie or a reincarnation. A resurrection is more than that. It is the same person, but recreated.

This re-creation, available to all, is a result of the peace with God through Jesus. The peace is more than a bargain. The Greeks bargained with (and bamboozled) their gods. Christians, though, surrender -- not with their minds only but also with their hearts. They surrender not to slavery, but to adoption.

A person adopted into the family of God starts to lose his resemblance to Adam. He becomes, in the end, a new kind of person, one for whom love is not a chore and patience is not a frustration but whose very instinct is to admire, not envy, those better than himself. This person breathes goodness like the air, not because he "has to" but because he is united with God who is good. Just as sexual union results in a new kind of creature -- the Couple -- out of the two lovers, every man and woman united with God changes.

Heaven, or being with God in a resurrected body, is more than a vague happy place. It is not a place where your every selfish whim is granted. It is where your every whim is a selfless desire to give. Heaven is really a wedding party. It is the never-ending celebration of the reunion of a loving God and the unfaithful people He has always loved. Though they have broken His heart again and again, He offers His hand out still.

Eternal love is the promise to all who will accept. Easter is the celebration of the day in history that proves the promise -- and the hope for the day when the promise is complete. If anyone desires to see what such a celebration is like, visit with the Christians this Sunday at Park Street Church, right in front of the red line stop, at either 11 a.m., 4 p.m., or 6 p.m.