In the middle section of Romans 8, Paul describes the salvation which God has set loose in Jesus Christ as cosmic in scope. What God is doing is much larger than the “personal salvation” on which popular American religious culture obsesses. God’s project of redemption encompasses a world, a universe, the whole cosmos, something grander than any individual person. That enormous canvas on which God’s might acts playout does not cancel the personal, by any means, but it by all means puts the personal into perspective. Salvation includes me, yes, but also and especially something much larger than me. God is saving me in concert with what God is accomplishing with the rest of creation.
The way through the current crisis provides a maddening illustration of a salvation that comes to us in the first-person plural (we and us) and not in the first-person singular (I and me). Some of us are more susceptible to the ravages of the corona, to be sure, and attention to personal care in these is absolutely necessary. As it happens, on the basis of my age alone, I fall into one of the at-risk categories of people. And yet paradoxically these disciplines of care are not for self alone but for a greater health among us all. The way through this pandemic is not simply a matter of personal striving, and there seems to be no individual escape-pod for anyone. The way to protect the most vulnerable among us is for all of us to practice the basics which we now know: Wash hands. Stay home. Keep a physical distance. It is actually the way to protect all of us, for we will surmount this crisis as we pull together. Some will become ill, yes, and too many will die. But in the end it is as a corporate body that at will prevail. Or not at all. Here is a hard maxim, but a scriptural one, for a nation whose myth fantasizes a rugged individualism.
Our Eucharistic Prayer D in Rite II is an adaptation from the fourth-century rite of St. Basil the Great. And in this prayer we offer thanks to God for everything accomplished in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, including this: “To fulfill your purpose he [Jesus] gave himself up to death; and, rising from the grave, destroyed death, and made the whole creation new.” (BCP, 374)
And made the whole creation new. Rising from the dead, Christ destroyed death indeed, but too often the focus turns toward that aspect of resurrection’s gift (a glorious one it is) and overlooks the making-new of creation. That re-creation is a work still playing out, to be sure, but what God has done in Jesus is nothing less than the reclamation of a whole universe, worlds beyond us and beyond our imagining. That enormous scope, that corporate work of salvation which goes beyond what we can possibly see even in our own mind’s eye: Perhaps that bigger-than-me sense of what happens in resurrection is exactly what we need this Easter.
Easter Reflection by Wayne Smith, Bishop of Missouri
Episcopal Diocese of Missouri
