Today is Easter and as is usual in Christendom it is a special season. The period is set aside to mark the reconciliation of man back to his creator, God. I don’t know what the theologians would hold against what I want to say now but for me Christianity is not about the cross.
Indeed, so many other religious body have the cross as part of their insignia but that doesn’t make them part of the Christian faith. The distinctiveness of Christianity is found and in fact located in the death and resurrection of Jesus, The Christ.
The truth is that issues of faith are matters of mystery and one thing about mystery is that they are often spiritual and hardly make sense to the ordinary man. You cannot use knowledge to fully comprehend issues of spirit. In relation to Easter, a friend sent in a post to my phone, to make an inquiry. He couldn’t understand why Christ, who we say is God, would have to come from heaven into human form and then die just to redeem man, His creation. On the surface, especially for those who major in philosophy, the above would seem very good and rational question but it is not so with those conversant with the mystery associated with the Christian faith.
In the faith, for instance, adherents know that God has exalted his words above every other thing and so are his processes. If he had said this is what He will do, He remains committed to it. Some of us who know his instructions concerning earth and heaven understand why Jesus Christ had to come in the form he came and why he had to do what he did. To the non-initiate, the process was nasty and humiliating. From the human point of view I can’t but agree, but the truth is that in that humiliation is the ultimate victory and honour. We all see it today on earth, even though in the occult world they know that at the mention of the name Jesus, their gods bow. Christ began and ended his ministry in the old Israel but a census of the Christian believers has the capacity to make one think he ran a global ministry. With an estimated 2.2 billion adherents in 2010, Christianity was said to be the faith with the largest followership.
I am sure if another study was commissioned the Christian faith would emerge the largest employer of labour, yet Christ never owned one company before he died, he did not print any book or engaged in any publicity stunt. More than 2000 years after his death he holds the record of the Most Talked About Personality in the whole world. Even the Gregorian calendar, which is in use till today is benchmarked by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If this is not authentication of a claim, one would wonder what else is. This is demonstration of power and the display of sovereignty of divinity. The world, including our country, should be interested in this development because it has a correlation to institutionalization of progressive development and abundant life when fully understood and more importantly applied.
One thing we have to take from this as a country should be the concept of sacrifice. Sacrifice is to place the society and the welfare of the human elements first. It is such a powerful tool, so important that God himself found it necessary to demonstrate its potency through the deployment of Jesus Christ. The result of what we have seen in the case of Jesus Christ is a testimony that whenever the tool of sacrifice is deployed that society or even individual would find progress and the rewards that follow it.
Every society that achieved development did so on the platform of sacrifice; there is no exception, whether Britain, Russian, China Germany or America that has become a model for us. When we talk about development and some people, politicians inclusive, behave and talk as if it won’t involve sacrifice, I laugh. I do so because our leaders who take to that path and convince the people to follow them have no sense of history; if they did they would have known that the founding fathers of those nations we describe as developed made so much sacrifices to take their nations to the point they are where everybody is happy and some others like those of us from here desire to run to at the slightest opportunity, most times at public expense, bringing ruin to our society in the process. Sacrifice means denial, both on the part of leaders and the led. The leaders give out certain privileges, interest and taste. They limit themselves to descent living and avoid exhibitionism. They bond the people and not divide them in search of undue political advantage. They confine themselves to their society and constrain themselves to what their nation can give and produce.
They avoid a hypocritical lifestyle, they don’t go to holidays where things that are good had been worked out or seek medical attention in places where the sweat of others have created excellent services and leave their people stranded in the midst of poor facilities. They teach their people to be in the struggle for positive development together. We should be teaching our citizens that development is by vision and sacrifice, it is not by cutting corners, subverting laid down rules and processes neither could development be reached by lowering standards and bastardizing the concept of meritocracy.
The bane of our society is lack of sacrifice and it would have been good if we all – leadership and the led – would be awaken by this celebration to think again and resolve to institute sacrifice as part of our strategy for national development. We all will be happier for it. We shall overcome.
This is wishing all my readers a happy Easter celebration and a most fruitful season…