No Guarantees
Seven days. A lot can happen, and did. A college basketball player lost control of his car and his life a few days after competing in the NCAA tournament. A 53 year-old man in Rochester became the sport of two teenage assailants who burned him to death. Ten people’s lives were taken by a mentally unstable gunman as they went about their normal Monday routine at a Colorado grocery store. A mother of six en route to a beach vacation was murdered by a drive-by shooter on I-95. All of this occurred last week when a lot did happen—a lot of sad, tragic, and regrettable events happened, all part of the story of our collective lives.
Long ago, in a similarly short period of time, patriotic passions nearly turned a parade into a riot and a protester threatened to shut down the sacrificial offerings in the temple. A conspiracy hatched by a disgruntled follower of a popular teacher led to his clandestine arrest. A hastily called inquisition gave way to a summary hearing with the governor in which the accused was sentenced to death. Then, as now, in the course of a single week, a lot of sad, tragic, and regrettable events happened in the story of our collective lives.
Whether confronted by the random acts of our present condition or those of our predecessors that continue to challenge and inspire both faith and doubt, one conclusion is unavoidable. Things happen to us irrespective of our decency or degeneracy, regardless of our deserving or innocence. Some provoke us to look for underlying causes that will give them sensibility, justifying our blame or offering us excuse. Others throw us back onto explanations that usually end with the bromide, “everything happens for a reason.” While comforting to the ears of the faithful, our minds struggle and our hearts cry out when, like Job, we fail to see good reasons behind the undeserved sufferings we witness or must endure.
Comparing a week from our time with those we lift up from the final week of Jesus’ life brings us face to face with the most soul-shaking question that all of us, religious or not, will ever ask. Why? Why do things like this happen? If there be a good and all controlling God, why would the Deity permit such things? Is there a plan behind it that we can’t fathom on this side of death? Or is human freedom so total that, in a universe governed by immutable laws, even God must stand by and watch what we do and what nature allows?
My ruminations on these questions are more than abstract theological ponderings. They are reflections upon a life that has, up until the present, been spared the kinds of unthinkable tragedies that fuel our news cycle on a daily basis. Not that I’ve been sheltered, mind you. I’ve said goodbye to parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, schoolmates and good friends. I’ve mourned for assassinated presidents, grieved for those victimized by war, and been moved to pity for those crushed by poverty and devastated by wind, fire or flood. All have gone the way of all flesh, a fate I’m increasingly accepting as it draws closer to my own future destiny. As a clergyman I’ve offered words of comfort and even celebration in presiding at the funerals of men and women, boys and girls, some of them infants and a few who never got the chance to open their eyes at birth. Many died of old age as we used to call it, but others were felled by automobiles, bullets, failing hearts and cancerous invasions that doctors could sedate and forestall, but not cure.
Through it all I’ve come to a conclusion recently put to me by my son, himself wrestling with misgivings about a future that seems more foreboding than encouraging: “Dad, there are no guarantees in life.” This is a bit hard to swallow for those of us who view life through the lens of that most American of all realities: the marketplace. What we purchase in labor and services comes with guarantees insuring their quality and survivability. What we buy to feed our families or satisfy our hunger at a restaurant comes with a tacit understanding that it is edible, has passed inspections, and is thereby guaranteed not to make us sick. Nearly everything we order online or load into our shopping carts at big box stores and specialty shops comes with a guarantee that it works and will last. Best of all, we can return it if it breaks, if we don’t like it or grow tired of it.
Being so immersed in a commodity culture with so many built-in guarantees, how can we not expect life to operate with similar assurances and warranties? Haven’t we been told from birth that we will be cared for and protected over the course of our lifetimes? Haven’t we been assured that we are special, that we shouldn’t be hurt or picked on, and above all things, that we should be happy? I’m not saying that most of us share the naïve optimism of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss whose refrain, “everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” is lampooned in Candide. Yet I sense in listening to so many voices on television and reading so many postings on social media that we may be closer in sentiment to Pangloss than we are to another French social critic, Jean-Paul Sartre, when he said, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Could it be that there is an uncertainty, a tenuousness to life that reduces all the guarantees we expect from life to be little more than wishful thinking?
This week I’ll be joining millions of Christians in remembering the scriptural accounts of the Passion of Christ that we will once again recite and commemorate in prayer, song and ritual. My mind will likely rivet on three of the gospel memories that, for me, speak to life as we know it, punctuated at every turn by what appears to us random and senseless tragedy:
“Not my will, but Thine, be done.”
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
“Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.”
In neither the solitude of Gethsemane nor the isolation of Calvary could Jesus escape the realization that life has no guarantees. Paul recognized it too, confessing in his letter to friends in Rome, that God “…did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all…” No guarantees—not for Jesus, and not for us either.
Whether trying to make sense of a week in our era, or coming to terms with the meaning of a week twenty centuries ago in which we yet discern a touch of holiness, we come back to the same realization: life comes with no guarantees. It may be the most sobering revelation of Lent, then and now. Faith need not take us down roads with Pangloss that make our optimism purely “cock-eyed.” Neither must we venture down pathways of hopeless cynicism either. For while faith can never guarantee that all will be well, it does inspire us to trust the one whose name, Emmanuel, assures us that God is with us. It is this realization, this opening of eyes, minds and hearts to God’s presence as Grace, as Love that wilt not let us go, that is sufficient to comfort and sustain us in spite of all that can, does and will happen in a world with no guarantees.
