Imagine…

At this point most people have heard at least in passing of the celebrity rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine. I was struck by the content of the song – a song that is supposed to bring comfort and hope. It begins:

“Imagine there’s no heaven/…No hell below us,/Above us only sky./Imagine all the people/Living for today.”

When you put these words to music, such a world does seem like a lovely place. But when you look at the implications of this – if you really think about a world that is nothing but atoms, void, and chance – you find something very different. Thousands of years before John Lennon started imagining, another, more insightful man painted a very different picture of this world.

“Absolute futility. Everything is futile. What does a man gain for all his efforts? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets; panting, it returns to its place where it rises…All the streams flow to the sea, yet the sea is never full…All thingsare wearisome; man is unable to speak… There is no remembrance of those who came before; and of those who will come after there will also be no remembrance by those who follow them.”

“Imagine there’s no countries/…Nothing to kill or die for,/And no religion…/Imagine all the people/Living life in peace…”

I suspect the doctors and nurses on the front line of this epidemic think there’s something to die for, not to mention our first responders and military still out doing our jobs. I don’t go to work every morning because I’m blindly nationalistic. I go to work because someone needs to stand in the breach between the evil and the innocent. It is true that a world without anything worth defending would be much more peaceful. But I would not call such a world ideal. I would call it a living hell.

Imagine no possessions…/No need for greed or hunger –/A brotherhood of man./Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world…”

I can see the appeal of such a world. But this dream mistakes the fundamental nature of man. It assumes that men are basically good, only driven to evil by hardship, fear, and ignorance. But that simply isn’t true. There are men who experience great tragedy and still choose to love and hope and show compassion. And there are men who know nothing but ease and comfort and still choose to do evil. It is not a matter of circumstances; it is a matter of individual choice.

Why can we not have this world of peace and plenty? It isn’t because of countries or religion or private property or ignorance. It is because we are the sort of people who, instead of donating money or volunteering, settle for making shoddy internet videos and using facebook banners to show support for a cause. It is because we are the sort of people who spend our time lambasting people we’ve never met for their facial expressions and the quality of their singing. It is because we number among us not only Mother Teresas, but also Al-Baghdadis.

Evil

Evil is real. We are not fighting ISIS over blind nationalism or colonialism or misunderstanding. We are fighting them because they murder, rape, torture, and burn, because they aspire to genocide and tyranny. Like their father, they come to steal, kill, and destroy. The Gestapo and KGB of the past, the current WPK of North Korea, ISIS, the Taliban, al-Shabab, al-Qaeda – they aren’t savages or monsters. They’re humans. Just like us.

Humanity is not basically good. We have goodness in us, but we also have evil. And until we acknowledge the magnitude of that evil, until we take off the rose-colored glasses and stare our true selves in the face, we cannot understand how massive the answer to that evil must be, for our hearts and for the world. Pop psychology and vague-sounding philosophy aren’t going to cut it. Overcoming evil requires real work and real sacrifice. It requires standing up, fighting, and dying.

It requires the cross. And it requires the resurrection.

“Crucifix” by LeChinchi is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0