Opinion: Look for love as we celebrate Easter Sunday

Today is a good day to remember Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter and a king and a servant. If you don’t know the story, he was killed by a bunch of religious people about 2,000 years ago because they didn’t like what he had to say.

Here’s the most important thing he had to say:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

Christians today celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and the promise of eternal life for his followers. Yet on this Easter Sunday we also live in a deeply divided community that too-often blames Christian faith as the foundation for this division.

Pick any hot topic: Abortion, sexual orientation, politics. Local social media posts are flooded with opinions guaranteed to inflame.

Some Christians use the words of Jesus in the Bible to support their position as evidence God is on their side.

Other Christians don’t take positions, citing some more of Jesus’ words:

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned.”

Still other Christians are afraid to speak their beliefs out loud, concerned they’ll lose friends or their businesses. Go public on the wrong side and you can be labeled “anti-Christian.” That’s how dangerous words can be these days.

Rachel Held Evans was a Christian writer who often challenged traditional beliefs in the faith. She died in 2019 at age 37 after an allergic reaction to medication she took for an infection. She left us ideas worth considering about Jesus’ words and the Bible and what to do with them:

“If you are looking for reasons to wage war, you will find them. If you are looking for reasons to promote peace, you will find them. If you are looking for an out-dated, irrelevant ancient text, you will find it. If you are looking for truth, believe me, you will find it,” she wrote.

Evans said the most instructive question to bring to biblical text is not “What does it say,” but “What am I looking for?”

“If you want to do violence in this world, you will always find the weapons,” Evans wrote. “If you want to heal, you will always find the balm.”

It’s good for people of all faiths to talk about complicated issues so we might learn to understand each other and live in better harmony.

It’s not healthy or productive to condemn those we don’t understand. We’re not likely to change their beliefs or actions through public shaming, especially if they’re not hurting anyone. And if they’re not hurting anyone, why is it anyone’s business?

As we celebrate the greatest comeback of all time this Easter Sunday, let’s also embrace Jesus’ instructions, without qualifiers: Love your neighbor.

— David Stevens

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