I recently re-watched the great movie Saving Private Ryan, and it struck me that Tom Hanks’ character’s dying lines are ones that Christians should also take to heart from Easter’s celebration (on this and every Easter weekend) – and which Americans ought to abide in our civic lives as well.
For those who somehow don’t know the movie: Its (fictional) story involves a small group of American soldiers immediately post-D-Day who are sent deep into Nazi-occupied France to find a paratrooper named Ryan, to send him home safely because his mother already had lost three other sons to combat deaths. In effect, Hanks’ squad is asked to risk (and, in most cases, lose) their lives so that Ryan might be saved.
With the climactic battle over and won, but Hanks mortally wounded, Hanks looks at Private Ryan and says, “Earn this. Earn it.” In other words: “Go live a good, constructive life so that our sacrifice for you won’t be in vain.”
In a very different context, but to much the same effect, that is the message St. Paul takes, and teaches, from Jesus’ crucifixion and the redemption it offers us. Paraphrased: “Through no virtue of your own, you have been saved by Christ’s sacrifice. Now, in gratitude, go live your life in way worthy of the salvation you already have received.”
(This somewhat oversimplified summary of Paul’s teaching is not meant to adjudicate interdenominational points of theological difference, nor to say that the salvific messages stressed by Saints Peter, James or John, or by Jesus himself, were exactly the same in emphasis as Paul’s – but only to say that this is indeed a key theme of Paul’s epistles. Again (in effect): “You have already been saved. No go earn it, after the fact.”)
In this conception, the fact that we are saved despite any particular lack of merit does not free us for lives of dissolution or self-indulgence. Instead, it places upon us a responsibility to go “do good” and help create the conditions in which others can better experience Christ’s saving love. We are obligated – although we should see the obligation not as a burden, but as a joy – to make sure the redemption isn’t wasted.
Okay, now let’s set aside the crib-notes theology. The same thrust of the joint message of Good Friday and Easter should apply to our American civic lives. Through no merit of our own (except for those who were actively recruited to immigrate here due to particular skills of ours), we Americans have been born into and blessed with the greatest degree of freedom, natural bounty, and national wealth in the history of mankind.
We did nothing to merit our status as Americans rather than, say, North Koreans or Congolese. We did nothing in the womb to earn a better fate than those born in the hells of Venezuela or Zimbabwe. We were saved from such fates by the limbs and lives of millions in combat, by the brains, principles, and patriotism of gifted leaders, and by the unsung industry of the daily lives of hundreds of millions in earlier generations of “ordinary Americans.”
We have no right to be self-indulgent. The world doesn’t owe safe spaces for fragile feelings. Institutions are not responsible for making us feel valued or special. Our comforts and conveniences begin as birth gifts, not birthrights, and should be re-earned, not demanded, as we move into adulthood.
Yes, our military personnel and first responders earn their American good fortune every day. But how many of the rest of us demand satisfactions of every whim? How many of us expect indulgences without merit or without doing the hard work of respectful participation in republican government, or of considerate, constructive community activities?
Look around. Our civic culture has gone to Hades: It’s uncivil, bitter, angry, and disrespectful. Our financial debts, governmental and personal, are at frighteningly record levels, with no regard for generations to come. We carp and complain, we litter and loiter, we assume the worst about each other while excusing our own worst flaws.
Far too many of us are not earning our blessings as Americans, but wasting them.
But this is Easter weekend. We are offered redemption, again and again. The gift is free, but the obligation is all the greater because we haven’t done anything to warrant the bestowal. In our faiths both religious and civil, then, let us show the appropriate gratitude – by going out, every day, and responding to our good fortune by earning it.
