Good news for the poor
SISTER MARGARET MARY SPEAKS AT
GOOD FRIDAY WALK OF WITNESS ECUMENICAL SERVICE
IN CHELMSFORD TOWN CENTRE
Good News for the Poor - Isaiah Chapter 61.
GOOD Friday – Good – what is so GOOD about Good Friday - If what happened 2000 years ago in Jerusalem, were to be headlined today, it would surely read as bad news - BAD Friday- ‘Young man, condemned to death, carries his cross to Golgotha, & is crucified’.
In fact, for Christians & non-Christians alike, Good Friday is an enormous stumbling block. We can, of course, see it simply as the ‘necessary evil’ in order for Easter Sunday to happen. But if we do that, then what about the suffering world that we live in, and the pain in our own lives too - maybe currently the loss of a job & a sense of being unable to provide for the family – a necessary evil? I don’t think so; broken relationship, recent diagnosis of terminal illness & on & on. Necessary evils, surely not.
Looking beyond ourselves, perhaps to Africa & in particular to the Democratic Republic of Congo where I have spent some time & where we have many sisters living & working - we find war for decades, murder, rape of women & young girls by HIV/Aids positive men on a daily basis in some parts. Young boys taken from their families to be brutalised as boy soldiers. No free education or health service - parents who cannot afford medication watching a child die of TB, Malaria - diseases that in the west are not killers simply because we have access to clean water & to the relatively simple medical treatment needed. All this is bad, bad news. Far from being a necessary evil, it is our task to eliminate the causes of such suffering. And no-one should pretend to us that it isn’t bad news nor that it is unreal - Christ’s sufferings were real & so are ours. It is a world that we, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, could find, & often do find, utterly overwhelming.
And yet today IS Good Friday - & what can we say? Not a great deal - Jesus on his Good Friday was mainly silent. Evil triumphed & the powers of this world won. And yet one thing we can say is that the grim reality of Jesus’s death tells us that all our Good Fridays are within the wide embrace of God. The outstretched arms on that cross embrace each of us in the pain of our heart that maybe only we know of - they embrace the pain of the African mother who sees her little girl raped & can do nothing to prevent it - they include the innocent victims of war - the torture of the political prisoner whose only crime has been to speak up for human rights - the fear of the asylum-seeker who is not welcome. Jesus’s cry ‘My God, why have you forsaken me’ surely makes it clear that Jesus has experienced the depth of despair. He certainly felt abandoned – we sometimes feel abandoned. But underneath that, at a deeper level, we, like Jesus, can know that those outstretched arms tell us that whatever happens to us in life, God loves us & is with us. Don’t we find many times in scripture, ‘Do not be afraid, I am with you’. And that embrace therefore means that there is just one Good Friday - Jesus’s Good Friday, yes - but within that, the Good Friday that each of us experiences - in loneliness, in fear, in disappointment, in the unfaithfulness of someone we love, in abuse, in discrimination - or whatever. In his agony on the cross, Jesus became one with all who suffer. Because all the sufferings of our world are part of that first Good Friday, then we can hope for a healed future. For however it seemed that day - the Friday - & the next day - the day Jesus’s body lay in the tomb & all seemed to be lost - it wasn’t the end.
Don’t fall into the trap of seeing Easter Sunday as somehow putting everything to rights again overnight - taking away what had happened - the pain, the mocking, the betrayal, death itself. Too easy & not at all scriptural, for Scripture emphasises that the Risen one remains the Wounded one. He showed his disciples his wounds – those in his hands & those in his feet & side. These were external wounds, but surely there were wounds of the heart too. We all bear wounds - possibly external wounds - more likely internal wounds of the heart. Much of the time these wounds are uppermost - we are on the cross, or shrouded, buried, entombed under disappointment, guilt, rejection. No, Easter does not cancel what has gone before. Jesus still has those marks of suffering - for he still suffers in each one of us. What Easter does show us is that we are on the way to healing, & that we are not alone on this journey - we are accompanied by the Wounded & Risen Jesus whose rising gives us hope that one day the Resurrection will be complete, & we, & all who share this universe with us, will know it.
Our God so enjoys our company that he calls us to help to bring him about the fullness of the Resurrection - to have a part in it. How do we bring about the Resurrection? We bring it about by being good news for the poor. The poor? Yes, certainly, the materially poor - but also the hurt one, the lonely one, the frightened one, the bullied one? You, me, our neighbours, those we are at school with, those we are at work with, our sisters & brothers across the world.
How can we be good news for them? The reading from Isaiah that we heard a few minutes ago gives us strong clues - ‘he has sent us to bind up the brokenhearted - to comfort all who mourn - to bring good tidings to the afflicted’. This is how we become co-creators of the Resurrection - this is how we, collaborating with God, bring it about. The gifts of the Resurrection are many but maybe hope is key. When we reach out to the afflicted - or when we allow others to reach out to us as afflicted ones - it is hope that is generated. Hope sustains us. Hope not just optimism - that ‘everything will be OK in the end’ kind of feeling - it is much more significant than that. We, with our hope, can be the evidence that Jesus is risen. With that hope, we are showing that death does not have the last word. In our day, arguably more than at any other time in history, we need to be women & men of hope. Doing our bit to bring about justice in less developed countries is an act of hope - giving support to someone recently bereaved is another act of hope - offering or accepting forgiveness is another. In such acts Jesus is rising, the Resurrection is taking place - Jesus, our hope, rises.
But, for the parent in Africa who sees her child hungry at birth, hungry throughout her short life & die young from starvation - where is the Resurrection ? Good Friday is certainly there, a long, long Good Friday. It seems impossible to roll away that immense stone of injustice. Yet we can be in solidarity - we can be people of hope for such a person. We can do what we can - whether it is sharing hunger by a fast, giving money, praying, taking part in protests about the need for the west to trade more fairly, or even, for a longer or shorter period, taking our teaching, medical, building skills somewhere where they are urgently needed.
Easter is not primarily concerned with life after death but has even more to say about life in the here & now. It tells us simply that our mission is to take the Good news to the poor – to be an agent of Resurrection for them.
Do we ask the wrong question about Easter? We maybe ask, ‘DID the Resurrection happen? Has it happened? Should it not be - Is the Resurrection happening now? If it is, then Good Friday is indeed Good Friday. The radical message of these special days is that the Kingdom of Heaven does not begin somewhere else, sometime later - it starts here & now, & we, you & me, are called by God to help bring it into being. The Eastering of our lives is living our own Good Fridays in certain hope that we will emerge into the fullness of God’s light & love. It is living alongside others in their Good Fridays knowing that they too will emerge into the fullness of God’s light & love.
Resurrection isn’t an historical word - it is a ‘now’ word. It promises that, however bleak our lives & the lives of others may seem, that life & hope will win through. We may have to wait for it - the plaintive refrain from the psalms "How long, O Lord, how long?" reminds us of that - & we WILL have to work for it, but it WILL come even to the darkest places. If we hold on to that we are Easter people of hope. When we bring the Easter gifts of joy, of peace, of forgiveness to others & share them with them, then we are living in the Kingdom of Heaven, & we know that Good Friday is indeed Good news for the Poor.
