From College Exams to Life’s Final Exam

Congratulations to the State U class of 2022! You’ve done it! You’ve landed at the finish line! Welcome to the rest of your life and (as the advancement office hopes) to decades of faithful donations to your alma mater! You deserve exclamation points!

Your parents are proud of you, but they also want you to know your bedroom is now the guest room, which now makes you … the guest. Your suite-mate is wondering if you’re going to take that couch with the big pillows or if they can have it for their second senior year. Your professors are too exhausted from the marathon of reading the garbled syntax of first-year papers to muster more than a vague memory of your occasional classroom presence.

You’re antsy to walk across this stage, and you expect you’ll have to listen to a bunch of advice from an old guy who can’t remember if they ever played beer pong when he was in college. So I ought to warn you. It probably wasn’t wise of the trustees and administration to grant me this boon, because I’m a decided atheist when it comes to the religion on which rituals such as these are founded. I don’t believe in progress, free will, or anything that smacks of the American dream. My hope is to disabuse you of the tropes you thought you’d hear today and give you something that will allow you to embark on what’s next with a vision for something more than making your mark on the world.

The place to start is not with your much vaunted accomplishments. Yeah, college is hard. Dead week and finals are a trial. I’m glad you found a way through them. If finishing college were a rock, its hardness wouldn’t match talc or gypsum on the Mohs Hardness scale. It’s no uber-hard diamond, but something like feldspar. You’d understand what I’m talking about if you’d chosen to take the “Rocks for Jocks” geology course option in the general education core. At any rate, I assure you that you will face many and more difficult things in the coming years.

Approach this end and beginning today as you might at the real end of things: your last day. The one where your life passes before your eyes, and you hope you’ve done it all well enough to get your final reward. E for effort gets you eternity. Most of us spend our days compiling a lifelong list of labors (or at least of good intentions) that we hope will tip the scales in our favor. But the criteria for judgment aren’t what you expect.

On “Inside the Actors Studio,” the late host James Lipton ended his interviews with famous celebrities with a set of questions ranging from their favorite sound to their favorite curse word. He always finished with “If heaven exists, what do you hope God will say to you?” Often the star will reply with something along the lines of “Good job,” or as we say in biblical circles, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.” We think the criteria are going to revolve around our string of actions and accomplishments, the arc of goodness we’ve strung across the heavens.

But the announcement of having done well has nothing to do with what happens between this day and that one. It has only to do with that final moment. The thing that makes you fit for the eternal supper of the Lamb is the one thing each of us does with utter perfection: death. When you’re dead you will have finally achieved the status of someone who can no longer contribute to their salvation with their own goodness, by power of their own so-called free will, with the gritting of teeth and the bootstrap pulling other commencement speakers will point you toward.

They want you to believe that, if you just believe in yourself enough and keep striving, you can achieve anything. But being told you’ve done well at your dying breath is to be told that you’ve stopped doing altogether, so that Christ can finally do it all. In other words, you’ve become nothing, so that Christ can be everything. And when he’s everything, you’ll be able to look back at the span of years to this day and see it all as his work from beginning to end with no contribution from you except as some kind of earthen vessel to contain all that grace and mercy poured out of him.

As you sit here today, I imagine you have a goal of becoming something. But I tell you with absolute certainty that this is a goal you’ll never accomplish. There will always be something more life demands of you: more time, more effort, more degrees, more money, more tchotchkes on your mantel and cars in your garage. By the time of your twenty-fifth reunion in your mid-forties, you’ll have discovered that it’s a rigged game you can never win. Your body won’t keep up. Your beauty will wane. Your possessions will possess you. As the old Frank Capra movie says, you can’t take it with you. Nothing whatsoever can stave off your exit from the stage.

I know. I know. I’m putting a downer on your day of glory. But bear with me. What I’m trying to do here is free you from the burden of thinking what makes your life worth living is success, status, and YOLO-ing your way through your days. If it is, then what you have ahead of you is a constant fear of missing out, the unrelenting pressure of happiness as a goal, and enough dashed expectations that will quickly turn you to cynicism and regret.

But what if heaven exists (and I assert it does) and God (who also exists) tells you that everything you need to accomplish will be done by you with every I dotted and T crossed simply by being dead and tucked away in his Son’s side? That means what you’re being released into today, as has been true of every day before this, is complete freedom. No matter your failures or successes, whether the shape of your life looks like Judas or like John, ups or downs, sicknesses and health, betrayal or fidelity, God promises it all coheres in the one who himself stretched the arc of life beyond the grave to eternity itself.

Here’s the good news for you. The one who created and sustains you has already shifted the tassel on your mortarboard to show that he’s already decided you graduate into a new class of creature. Your freedom is fully at hand, not because you’re good, smart, or worthy enough to merit it. You’re free, because it’s God’s delight to take a rough-and-tumble, inarticulate, scruffy, bunch like you, with all the regrets and excuses you have in your back pockets, and make you his very own. It’s his eternal promise that your nothingness is all you need. No longer is there a need to be self-made. When you have this kind of low anthropology, the only direction is up. And your destination is sure.

Relax already. Or not, if you like not relaxing better. Just know that what’s ahead of you is sheer gift from beginning to end. All you need to do is get through it by doing the next thing and the next and the thing after that. When it’s all said and done, then I’ll see you at an even better reunion than the one the alumni office has planned for you in 2057. I can’t wait to hear what happens for you.