Russellings of the Spirit

“IT’S NOT FAIR!”

If you are a parent and have NOT heard this phrase at least 65,000 times from your kids, you’re not doing it right.

In my experience, no one has a keener sense of fairness than those miniature people we call children.

They instinctively know when they have gotten the short end of the deal.

Whether the topic is serving sizes, bedtimes, Christmas presents, privileges, allowances, parental attention, or… I don’t know… exposure to sunlight; kids know what kind of distribution plan is fair and what kind is not.

And they will not hesitate to tell you when you have violated their finely honed sense of justice.

This whole subject of fairness crossed my mind the other day while watching a movie. This movie was set in Elizabethan era England. In one scene, a woman was in bed, dying of an ailment that had badly compromised her ability to breathe. The doctors gathered around sadly shaking their heads. It was clear that they were out of ideas and treatments and would soon be telling the woman’s husband about her tragic and premature death.

As it turned out, the woman was dying of influenza.

The flu.

The same flu that I drive down to my neighborhood CVS Pharmacy and get vaccinated against every October. The same flu that might – if I were to contract it somehow – put me down for three or four days.

And so I wondered: how is that fair? Just because this woman – and thousands like her – happened to be born 400 years before me, why did her life have to be cut short by something I treat with a simple shot in the arm today?

Or how is it fair, for example, that children of the early 1800s were forced to work in factories and mines and sweat shops, subjected to all kinds of horrible working conditions before we figured out it was wrong and made those practices illegal?

My own mother died in 1970 of a type of lymphoma that is readily treatable today with aggressive chemotherapy. So how is that fair?

And while it may stretch the boundaries of your imagination when I say this, it is also true that there were millions of people on this planet who lived entire lifetimes without once experiencing the miracle of the Internet.

Talk about UNFAIR!

So why all this injustice in the world?

The only answer I can come up with is the answer I used to give my own kids when they would hit me with the “It’s not fair!” complaint: “Sorry, kid… life’s just not fair.”

And it’s true. Life is not fair. In any sense of the word.

All of which brings me around to the focus of this week: the holiest week of the Christian calendar. This is the week in which Christ-followers around the world will remember and even re-create many of the events of the last week of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth… the one we call CHRIST or Anointed.

My faith confession is that Jesus is Lord of my life… meaning he is IT. It all starts and ends with him. There is no higher authority than Jesus for my life.

I further confess faith in his life, his death, and his bodily resurrection from the grave… even though that last bit defies rational, scientific understandings of the way things work. Because faith means being OK with the idea that some things can be true even if they don’t add up scientifically.

Finally, I confess to you here today that the truth of the resurrection of Jesus totally TRANSFORMS the lives of those who “buy it” – that is, who believe in his resurrection and have faith in God’s ability to overcome all obstacles… even an obstacle as formidable as death.

The reason I believe in the transforming power of the resurrection so strongly is because I have SEEN it… with my own eyes! I have seen it in my own life! I have seen it in the lives of friends… family members… total strangers.

This all started as faith, but then became SIGHT.

Which causes me to circle back to the question of fairness. And so I ask: if the life, death, message, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has this kind of healing and transforming power (and it does!), what about the folks who never had a chance to hear it and say “YES” to it?

What about the people who lived and died before the time of Jesus? Faithful people like Moses and Abraham and Isaiah and David and Isaac and Daniel? Or even just random farmers and shopkeepers named Fred, Tom, Elizabeth, and Stuart?

What happened to them? Are their souls lost forever? And if so, how is that fair?

Or what about people living today who – for whatever reason – have never had the opportunity to hear the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

Are they eternally condemned? Where is the fairness in that?

Somehow I cannot accept that the God depicted in the pages of the Bible would look at each of these folks, shrug his divine shoulders, and say, “Sorry, kid. Life’s just not fair.”

It cannot be that the God described as “… merciful and gracious,” in various places, and who, we hear, “… forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit,” and “… crowns you with steadfast love and mercy” could be satisfied to just write off countless generations because they were born at the wrong time or place.

I am sure he isn’t. And I’ll be darned if I know how it would work that THEY would get to connect with Jesus, too.

That whole topic is WAAAAYYY above my pay grade.

All I know for sure is this: Jesus Christ is alive. Forevermore. And the reality of his life holds the promise of eternal and abundant life for every single one of us.

Hallelujah!

And Happy Easter.