c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ Bombing and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia are a fitting backdrop for the last Easter of this second Christian millennium.

While churches in America prepare grand parades and Easter egg hunts, ethnic Albanians flee for the borders in a desperate attempt to escape the government’s marauding troops. While choirs rehearse Handel’s”Hallelujah!”chorus _ some with orchestral accompaniment, some without _ NATO missiles try to stop the massacres by breaking the Yugoslav government’s will.

Meanwhile, candy stores and florists are making their hay, college students are streaming back from spring frolics at the beach, garden shops are busy, and the stock market is toying with a 10,000 Dow.

The incongruities are overwhelming.

If one were to judge by outcomes, the salvation drama has been a bust.

Except for pockets of prosperity, where the benefactor has generally been capitalism and good luck, not divine providence, the human condition is little changed from biblical days. Less disease, but no less hatred and brutality; better roads and sanitation, but still vast disparities in whose belly is full; more books and faster communications, but also more addictions, more violence against children and women, more guns, more locked doors.

From a global perspective _ which surely is God’s perspective _ the second Christian millennium displays humankind’s remarkable capacity to trivialize human life.

But Easter was never about outcomes.

Jesus refused to defend himself when under assault. Jesus refused to deploy force or magic to save himself. Quite deliberately, Jesus didn’t leave behind an army to storm the gates of darkness, or an institution to wield power in his name.

Not only was Jesus silent before his accusers, but he was silent about what would come next. Jesus didn’t outline the consequences of his sacrifice. He just said it would happen.

Easter was a lonely, ambiguous event that touched few lives, stirred more confusion than exultation, and left behind a string of disjointed memories, sayings and insights, which not even the wisdom of hindsight could arrange in a neat scenario.

Jesus died virtually alone, his army of admirers having fled to safety. To the extent that anyone noticed his death, their cry was one of mockery and revenge. In the middle of the night, his body disappeared, under circumstances that not even a shroud’s tantalizing fragments can explain.

Believers have tried to make the Passion the first act of a drama leading to a golden era, or in modern techno-speak, the kickoff of a”plan of salvation.”One empire-builder after another has used Easter as explanation for his good fortune and, more often than not, as justification for his particular brutality.

I chanced across a television preacher the other night. Far from Kosovo or Ethiopia or Wounded Knee, a natty, smiling man stood before prosperous suburbanites in a vast auditorium and spoke cheerfully about God’s”sovereignty”and God’s”plan.” For that small slice of humankind, the second Christian millennium ends on a high note. In their minds, Calvary evidently has done what Calvary was intended to do, namely, promote their prosperity and satisfaction.

For Albanian refugees, the Easter sun rises on a different reality. Does that reality refute the Easter claim? Does humankind’s persistent brutality reveal Easter as dreamy illusion, or at best an ineffectual stab at betterment?

To my mind, we need, in this third Christian millennium, to wrestle with the question of outcomes. We need to set aside the language of empire, the paeans to self of the prosperity gospel, and our native urge to form a club or an institution when we sense something happening.

We need to gaze upon the cross itself and to ask, What did God intend to flow from that? If not the unique good fortune of Rome, or of Austria, or of England, or of Germany, or of America, then what? If not an institution that does good parades, good arguments and, occasionally, good deeds, then what?

We need to stand before the empty tomb _ and then stand some more. Not break out into chorus of exultation, not grab bonnet and blade and walk a parade. But just stand in the lonely place where Jesus died and rose again, and let that be where the millennial dawn finds us.

DEA END EHRICH