Confronting my moral failures this Easter

At this time each year I hear the message of Easter at church: Jesus, who was God as a human being, willingly gave himself to be killed for our sake. This was to take the punishment for our sins. Three days later he rose from the dead. He later ascended into heaven, and we can follow after him in eternity. This year, I think about this message in the context of a world like ours today where morality is a hugely important conversation. I don't mean morality as in exclusive church-ey piety, which is definitely not a central conversation (but rather, unfortunately, the butt of jokes). I mean morality as in living justly and ensuring no one lives in injustice, and at the same time cultivating patience, kindness, generosity, and other virtues in myself. 

On the matter of justice, the past year's enforced shutdown of normal life has given me more breath and attention to observe and respond, in what way I can, to grave, prolonged injustices around me. I think of police brutality, racial injustice, gender-based violence, and political abuse—all of which you can probably map onto international headlines you've seen yourself. The prosecution for George Floyd's death, for example, started a few days ago and has been dominating headlines. 

I feel a strong moral pull to pursue justice, using my time, my voice, and my relationships to right wrongs and make peace. But I always feel an inner dissonance as a result of my failures to do enough: for my selfishness with my time, my fear of consequences, and my self-centered desire just to be seen as a good person rather than to be one regardless of an audience. I get this expression of "dissonance" from Augustine, who wrote that he lived in between two warring wills. One, a will to live a life bound to God, and two, a will to follow his personal impulses without being dictated by God. He wrote that in the dissonance between these two wills, his soul disintegrated. I identify with that, and I think that, to a measure, someone who doesn't have a will to be bound to God but has a will to somehow be good, will also feel some dissonance. We never measure up to who we think we ought to be. 

This dissonance is haunting, and it doesn't quite go away just by being ignored. Always in me I feel this wrongness, of not being good enough in moral terms, wanting to be better, but being unable to. My many failures trail behind me at every step, and it sometimes feels like there's nothing I can do about them—that I just have to hear them rattle in my past as I bring them, ever amassing, into my future.

The Easter message reminds me that God's pattern from the beginning has been to heal and redeem our inevitable moral failures for us. Back in Abraham's time, God did not allow Abraham to kill his son Isaac as a sacrifice for his sins. Instead, he provided Abraham with a ram, which Abraham killed as a sacrifice instead. Abraham remembered that provision by the phrase Jehovah-Jireh, meaning God will provide (Genesis 22). This was God's pattern from the beginning. Eventually, by coming into the world in human form (as Jesus Christ), God completed the payment for our unjust lives forever, so that like Isaac, no one who holds to Jesus would have to pay the final price of our failures. He would sever the trailing failures from us for good. 

The violence probably seems so unnecessary. Do failures have to demand a penalty, and a violent one? As Christian Wiman grappled with it, he called it a "perverse calculus" that God had to die in our place (though it's not clear what it was he found perverse about it). But really the need for a costly penalty is evident in our deep intuitions of justice. A picture that comes to mind is that of Edward Colston's statue being tumbled into the Bristol Harbour: a death sentence by drowning, an eternal damnation into our modern hell. 

Credit: PA Media and on BBC

By tumbling statues, we acknowledge gross injustice and denounce it, and the people associated with it, as damnable. We pronounce rightful guilt and pass sentences for it. As archaic as it seems to talk about "divine penalties", the impulse to justly condemn is alive and well and growing in our time. 

God's act of redeeming our moral failures for us, taking the outstanding penalties in our place, is wonderfully sweet in this context I find myself in. Especially so because, combined with this just impulse to condemn, in this unjust world I find myself weighed down daily with more and more moral obligations in the effort to accomplish justice. I find myself charged to ferret out and cut my complicity in evil—in my purchases, investments, and associations—to carry out due diligence about the businesses I buy from, the banks I use, the organisations affiliated with my school. I also think of how we are increasingly charged with complicity because of inaction: for not recognising personal privilege and not using our position to alleviate the downtrodden. I think, for example, of the charges against men who do not actively seek to promote women's safety in the wake of Sarah Everard's death. 

This ever-expanding set of obligations, just as they are, has no stopping point. Wilfred McClay has called this the infinite extensibility of guilt. Fancy term to say that we won't really reach the end of the list of things to feel justly guilty about. So the world I find myself in is one where: 

• We condemn figures of history and people of privilege, not just by dropping them from history but by subjecting them to ceremonial denunciation (ceremonial drowning, like Edward Colston's statue). 
• At the same time we recognise more and more ways to use our positions to alleviate injustices and right wrong relationships, and these translate into more and more moral obligations.

The result, at least for me, is the sense of a fugitive life: the sense that I am always not doing things right and need to hide my failures. I can just try to grit my teeth and hope to do better tomorrow. But that's not going to get anywhere. I will fumble: say an unkind word, think a prejudiced thought; I will feel guilty after watching one too many episodes of Brooklyn 99 when I could have, in theory, spent it checking in with a hurting friend or writing a useful piece about an issue I care about. At the end of every day I will have gritted my teeth smooth, and I will lay in bed mortified still, by how far short I fall of the standards of goodness I aspire toward.

But Easter celebrates God's act of taking my guilt away from me. It reminds me that my failures are not the final bitter reality, that I don't need to stand in this dissonant space, crumpled. Finding myself in a world supercharged with cries for justice, and wanting to play my part in it, I can see myself at the supper table with Jesus like on the night before he died, as he prepares us to receive His sacrifice for our failures. At the same time, I am reminded afresh that there is a standard of justice that God has proven and upheld by paying the penalty needed to forgive our failures, rather than just cheaply forgetting them. We have a real good standard to hope in, strive toward, and trust that God will execute in time to come. Indeed, it is a standard so high that God himself had to come and meet it, as no person could do so themselves. 

The bar is high, but as God steps forward as the sacrifice Lamb, I find rest for my fugitive soul. Yes, my soul—disintegrating in the dissonance between my wills, and ever scurrying between the impulse for greater justice (when I see people oppressed) and greater mercy (when I see my own failures)—my soul can rest. That is the great, great love of God: to align our world with justice, but to mend the broken people (all people) who still fail in their best efforts to live justly, at infinite personal cost. Knowing God has paid the price for injustices—a ceremonial execution far more humiliating than a Bristol Harbour drowning—keeps me from ever being flippant about justice and morality, yet gives me confidence and energy to pursue them. Knowing my soul has been restored, and at a dear price, I can wake up to each day fully aware of my failures past and future, yet spring forward in a deep and honest desire to do better with God's enabling. This Easter weekend and beyond, I thank God for this rich, rich freedom.

"He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." Romans 4:25