We've talked about this recently, but here's where I find some core of a story worth keeping alive in my own reading of the choices that Jesus made with his crucifixion, Patrick. It won't really unravel any of your well landed points about sacrificial atonement, but it does provide me with something that I hang onto with some sense of hope. It boils down to just this -- No matter how we are treated, it's simply not worth our becoming the essence of hostility that we will quite likely be faced with from people who hate our embrace of the beatitudes. In the long run, in the greater scheme of things, maybe, just maybe, I can dream, with Martin, that there is a long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. And if I pass, like a wisp, for that hope, it would be a help to the bending of that arc in a direction that I cherish, to have passed doing that hope no harm and instead having some peace in willing my own self and history to be a part of a bigger dream to which I aspire.
We've talked about this recently, but here's where I find some core of a story worth keeping alive in my own reading of the choices that Jesus made with his crucifixion, Patrick. It won't really unravel any of your well landed points about sacrificial atonement, but it does provide me with something that I hang onto with some sense of hope. It boils down to just this -- No matter how we are treated, it's simply not worth our becoming the essence of hostility that we will quite likely be faced with from people who hate our embrace of the beatitudes. In the long run, in the greater scheme of things, maybe, just maybe, I can dream, with Martin, that there is a long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. And if I pass, like a wisp, for that hope, it would be a help to the bending of that arc in a direction that I cherish, to have passed doing that hope no harm and instead having some peace in willing my own self and history to be a part of a bigger dream to which I aspire.
Preach.
Thanks, Daniel. “A bigger dream to which I aspire.” I embrace that still in my own way.
Well. When you put it that way. It does sound kind of silly, doesn't it?