Easter Sunday: But dead people, no matter how great they are, are supposed to stay dead

Easter Sunday

Sally and the Question of Fairness

“What’s the deal with God being so unfair?”
--Clueless in Colorado

People have wrestled with the unfairness of God for as long as we’ve been in relationship to something larger than ourselves. I’ve spent a large part of Lent struggling with this question.

I’m not sure the word “fair” has any business in our conversations about God. Fairness is a word we can apply, uh…fairly, in our business with each other. But because God is God, and we are not, because God’s ways are not our ways, God’s timing is not our timing, God’s economy is not our economy, it’s pretty unfair for us to expect God, the creator of all things in all places at all times, to be fair. God did a pretty good job of explaining that to Job, who had a whole bunch of unfair things happen to him.

What’s fair about many things in life? Infertility, failed relationships, abject poverty, identity theft…what’s fair about those things. On the other hand, what’s fair about spontaneous remission or watching the hurricane turn the “right” way? Both sets of circumstances are unfair. Both sets of circumstances happen every day. God listens to and hears and acts in both sets of circumstances.

God isn’t fair.

God blesses. God gives grace and mercy in full measure. Because we are not God, it’s hard to see the grace and mercy, the blessings and the miracles in the mess, in the hurt, in the agony. I don’t mean to explain away horrible things that happen—earthquakes, heart attacks, car wrecks, terrorist attacks, or any of the other awful things that are unfair. They are awful, and God mourns our losses, hurts our hurt, and comforts us in our despair. It just means that we don’t think the way God thinks. We don’t see what God sees. We don’t know as we are fully known; we never will, not on this side of things, anyway.

What is ultimately unfair is Good Friday. The only thing more unfair than Good Friday is Easter Sunday. It’s unfair to kill an innocent man, the Son of God, sent to free us from our sins. It’s terrible. It’s a tragedy that marks us. But dead people, no matter how great they are, are supposed to stay dead. That’s fair.
Fair isn’t so great, sometimes.

God knows that for us, grace and mercy are more important, more powerful, more full of love than fair could ever be. So, God gives us Easter, where fair stops mattering at all, because God exploded fair and unfair, forgiveness and sin, heaven and hell, death and life, and left us with an empty tomb and a garden in full bloom, instead of the stink of death and betrayal. The profound and immeasurable love of that day, of Easter morning, is unfair, unwarranted, and unfathomable.

On days when I want to cry and yell about how unfair this life is, I remember the lesson of Easter…that love, in its best and highest form, is starkly unfair. I still think God is unfair, and that is something we each have to deal with in our own way, reconcile between ourselves and God. I know that one day, this will make sense to me, and God will explain why it’s so hard to understand on this side of things.

I’m clueless, right along with you, in spring-flushed Colorado. But, with enough snacks, enough Easter eggs, and enough reminders about how much God loves us, maybe fair won’t matter as much.

Bushels and pecks of peeps…and love,

Sally