Imagine there is no ultimate meaning, purpose or goal toward which our lives are headed.
Imagine there is no overarching design and no inherent significance.
Imagine if our lives were reduced to the pot luck outcome of billions of years of impersonal atoms and molecules running around hitting and missing, making and destroying.
Imagine a world where the reality of conscience and moral choice has no grounding in a purpose beyond that of group survival in the evolutionary race to the top.
Imagine human affections are ultimately an illusion, a cruel joke orchestrated by the impersonal rules pf physics.
Imagine all the people living for today, for tomorrow is the end.
Welcome to the world offered by John Lennon’s song, Imagine.
Jimmy Carter was buried yesterday, following a State memorial service in Washington DC. Attention on the former American President and Statesman was somewhat overshadowed by the media’s obsession with Donald Trump. Cameras fixated on Trump’s every facial expression and movement of his lips. To the frustration of some, Former Presidents Trump and Obama were caught not only speaking to each other, but laughing and sharing whim as the service began.
The truly strange moment occured when Trisha Yearwood Garth Brooks performed John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I don’t know whether ‘Imagine’ was selected by Carter himself, or by his family or by the ecclesial folk at Washington’s national Cathedral. Whatever the case, ‘Imagine’ is a strange and indeed hopeless song for any funeral, let alone one that is meant to be Christian in nature.
I’ve noted over the past decade thanks to several Olympic Games Ceremonies and a COVID celebrity rendition, John Lennon’s ‘apotheosis’ has become an international anthem. To rouse people and provide solace, ‘Imagine’ has become to go to song. And yet, ‘Imagine’ is void of meaning and hope. Lennon’s words strips away ultimate meaning and concrete hope, and instead offers a materialistic world where everything is up for grabs and where death is the ultimate winner. In doing so, ‘Imagine’ provides the very philosophical groundwork for authoritarian and thuggish autocratism. Imagine excuses political aspiration and ideological illiberalism, for who is to judge and hold us to account? What Divine Being establishes truth and justice?
In contrast to Lennon’s nihilist proclamation, people want to know that there is hope beyond a crisis and that there is hope when faced with mortality.
Imagine gives little consolation to a gravely ill person that not only is death imminent, but that it is ultimately meaningless. This atheistic ethic doesn’t do much to help grieving families who have just witnessed a loved one being ripped from their lives.
We want there to be a heaven; a better world with a better life. We want the cessation of sorrow and suffering, but Imagine cannot offer any such promise.
At the same time, hell is also a necessity, for we do not want to live in a world where evil wins or where injustice prevails. While we should be thankful for our judicial system, it is not full proof and many terrible deeds are never prosecuted. People need to know that in death the wicked do not escape justice. Imagining there is no hell would be a form of hell its self.
John Lennon’s song collapses in on its own irrationality. He imagines ‘living life in peace’, and there being no “greed or hunger”, but such talk demands a form and purpose, but atheism and naturalism cannot provide such a definition.
Every funeral is a voracious reminder of the fragility of life and the uncertainty of building society on credit. Hedonism is vanity. Pushing against greed and social disharmony suggests meaning, but meaning is disqualified in a God-absent universe. As Solomon the wise wrote in the book of Ecclesiastes,
“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
Nietzsche was right, at least as far his logic is concerned, that “the masses blink and say ‘We are all equal – Man is but man, before God – we are equal.’ Before God! But now this God has died.” A contemporary of Nietsche, Anatole France retorted without regret,
“It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.”
What if there is heaven and hell? What if God exists? Everything must change. What we think and say has greater import. How we live and how we treat others has far more consequence.
What if the God who exists is the God of the Bible: who is Sovereign, and altogether righteous and loving, just and kind? What if Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God, the One who as John testifies,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it…The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
These words are far more sustainable and substantial than the sentiment of living in a world without Divine structure. A Biblical view of the world both assesses its beauty and its horror, the worth and the uncertainty. This is not only the Baptist view of reality, but the Christian one, and one that is closer to message (that I believe) that guided Jimmy Carter’s life.
These Scriptures bring us to the most astonishing words, ones that counter John Lennon’s pipe dream with concrete hope,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16)
MurrayCampbell.net 