Choose Life Quotes

“The preaching of Peter and Paul and all the witnesses of the risen Jesus says that two basic things are demanded of us. First: we must acknowledge our own share in what the cross is and represents; we must learn to see ourselves as caught up in a world where the innocent are scapegoated and killed and where we are all unwilling, to a greater or lesser degree, to face unwelcome truths about ourselves. We must learn to see that we cannot by our own wisdom and strength cut ourselves loose from the tangle of injustice, resentment, fear and prejudice that traps the human family in conflict and misery. And second: we must learn to trust that love and justice are not defeated by our failure; that God has provided from his own strength and resourcefulness a way to freedom, once we have become able to recognize in the face of the suffering Jesus his own divine promise of mercy and life. The resurrection is the manifesting to the world of the triumph of a love that uses no coercion or manipulation but is simply itself – an indestructible love. The challenge of Easter is to believe that God is not defeated by the most extreme rejection imaginable. Good news? Emphatically yes. But not easy news. To recognize God in the crucified Jesus alters so much: it alters what we think about God, and it alters where we look for God in the human world. It suggests uncomfortably that God is likeliest to be found among those we have, like the religious and political establishment of Jesus’ day, dismissed or shut out; it suggests that our models of success and failure have to be turned upside down; it suggests that our eternal future is bound up with whether we are able to turn to those we have hurt and seek forgiveness. And so much else. Put like that, it is not surprising that the gospel and the cross could provoke fear and an unwillingness to allow such thoughts to become part of the current of public discussion. And perhaps it is not surprising either that we who call ourselves Christians may secretly be happier treating the cross just as a ‘religious symbol’ than letting ourselves be shaken and unmade and remade by it.”
― Rowan Williams, Choose Life: Christmas and Easter Sermons in Canterbury Cathedral