Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Seven Last Words of Christ #7

Lenten Meditation
April 8, 2009

Seventh Word
Luke 24.46, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

It’s one thing to take your life in your hands. Want to scale that mountain? It’s your life. Want to hop on your granddaughter’s skateboard and try out the half-pipe? It’s your life. We tend to think what we do with ourselves in private and that doesn’t affect anyone else is our business. It’s a form of ethical egoism. An ex-Marine friend of mine said they called it the 180 rule when he was in the Pacific—what happens west of the 180th stays there. Vegas took ethical egoism and made it into a PR campaign. As long as no one else can get hurt, why not?

It’s another thing to take someone else’s life in your hands. Physicians take the Hippocratic Oath—first of all, do no harm. When your patient comes in need of help, you diagnose, you treat, but under it all, you recognize that you have an obligation to someone else’s health and happiness. Any time you drive a child to school you’re taking someone else’s life in your hands—so don’t text or do email while you’re driving. For that matter, even when you’re alone in the car, the other drivers on the road are in your hands. Professionally, personally, emotionally, legally—we have a responsibility for each other’s well-being, a sacredness of life to honor and uphold. If the Good Samaritan had come along a little earlier and seen the robbers beating up the man beside the road, he would have been obligated to stop the mugging, not just wait until it was over to bind the wounds. Internationally, politically, we get involved because when you have the responsibility to help someone else and the power to do it, it’s wrong not to. As Emmanuel Levinas put it after the Holocaust, when we meet someone face-to-face, we become responsible for them.

Taking your life in your own hands is relatively easy, but isolating. Taking another’s life in your hands is inevitable, and morally compelling.

It’s another thing entirely to place your life in God’s hands. This isn’t a question of obligation. The great commandment aside, you cannot order someone to love you and force it to happen. No matter how loud you scream, “Trust me!” or how successfully manipulative you are with someone else’s emotions, you can’t make someone have faith in you. And neither can God. With all God’s power to create, enable, and persuade, God cannot force us to love him or have faith in him and maintain that the results are genuine love and faith. It’s up to us. To place my life in God’s hands is to acknowledge that I am not the center of the universe. To place my life in God’s hands is ultimately an act of the deepest trust.

But when you have commended your life into God’s hands, you have done what Jesus did on the cross. You haven’t denied your own strength to act for yourself, because it takes tremendous strength to let go of that to which we most closely cling. You haven’t given up responsibility, because it is an act of great responsibility to decide where your life belongs. Instead, you have embodied the deepest faith and love of which human being are capable. You have come finally to the cross. You have found your life in God.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Your thoughts?