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Morning Devotion for the Season of Easter

May 26, 2023

Feast Day of Saint Augustine

Invitatory

On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen.

Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:17–21

If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Meditation – Peter Vanderveen

According to the writer of Ecclesiastes – whose writings have been given Scriptural authority – there’s never anything new under the sun. Everything that is, at any given moment, is just a variation on what has always been. Yes, we make changes and even progress, but this amounts to little more than the work of rearranging. All sorts of things can be renewed or refreshed or refurbished or reworked or repurposed. But the prefix “re” alerts us to the fact that all these things are merely a reordering. In an essential way, the world remains the same no matter what we do or accomplish. And to strive to achieve something truly new, he insisted – repeatedly – is vanity. Useless. Newness may be possible for God, but it’s well outside our reach.

This may, at first, seem blatantly wrong; but age and experience have a way of reinforcing the writer of Ecclesiastes’ conviction. Whatever may be excitedly proclaimed to be new tends to seem less so with advancing years. It may be different, even radically so; but eventually what had seemed to be newness will be reabsorbed back into the usual rhythms and rules of the world that we have long already known. And there’s a certain comfort in this. Continuity is a form of reassurance. It feels like wisdom; which replaces the desire for newness with a kind of resigned confidence.

How, then, should we understand Paul’s claim about the work of Jesus? Paul seemed to have the comprehensiveness of Ecclesiastes in mind, for, according to Paul, Jesus didn’t make something new within the world – like encouraging others to grand efforts of love or urging individuals to believe in him for their own salvation. We should give Paul’s words the magnitude he intended. Jesus has overturned the core logic of our world. Everything that we had before expected and relied upon has now been thrown out. The whole of creation is new. The old order, and everything about it, is no longer. It hasn’t been merely revised or reformed or restructured. Nothing remains the same – because God’s judgment has been completely removed. Everything that from the beginning of time has served to divide us has come to nothing; instead, God’s singular response to all persons and events is now reconciliation, not recompense.

This has been exasperatingly difficult for us to apprehend. We keep reverting back to insistences that God must act in accord with the old order. Judgment must be inescapable. No newness is allowed. It would be offensive and unfair. So we return again and again to the old habit of trying to present ourselves as better than others – when, in Christ, judgments of better and worse no longer have any bearing. Easter comes once each year, and we make it a feast. But by the next morning we rejoin ourselves to all our former ways. These, we assume, are constant.

But Paul holds out for us the possibility that this need not be so. Instead of being mired in the sameness of everything and its rather weary predictability, there is God’s invitation for us to leap into the newness of a world wholly defined by grace, which is always, in every succeeding moment, new with the lightness of joy.

Think of faith in this magnitude. And imagine, then, as Paul did, that we all then become the ones in whom the greatest work of God can be seen. The challenge of faith is living into the enormity of this gift.

Prayer

You come to us, O Christ.

You are the Alpha and the Omega

The beginning and the end. All times

And seasons are yours, and in you

All things hold together and are brought to completion.

Draw us by your Spirit into communion

With you and one another and make us and all things

Whole and free in the full force

Of your deathless love.

The Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold