Thought for the
Week - 1st May 2008
Through a Glass
Darkly
A letter arrived on Sunday afternoon, posted through the
letterbox when I was out.
It wasn’t a bill or an invitation to dinner. It was a rather
hurtful critique of me, as a priest, which completely took
me by surprise. I suppose no-one likes to be criticised and
especially not by a friend.
The problem with ‘paper complaints’ is that they fail to
express the tone of delivery.
The reader is always left wondering and, probably, tends to
read more into what is ‘said’, without any comfort of any
correction being available. It was a very sad receipt of
someone’s unhappiness and upset.
After twenty years in ministry, in my experience, people
seem to spend more time being upset than being happy.
Why are we
determined to be upset – because someone has offended or
insulted us; impugned our integrity; deceived and lied to
us; failed to acknowledge our generosity or just simply
ignored us? The Gospels are full of stories about people
who feel ‘hard done to’ and ‘left out’, spurned and
wronged.
The truth is, we cannot be denigrated or abused, through the
actions of others, unless we choose to be so! If we are offended or upset, it is
because we think we deserve better and, quite frankly, that
flies in the face of Gospel teaching. Jesus tells
us that if we are struck on one cheek by someone, which
could be seen as a physical or verbal action, we should not
retaliate, but ‘turn the other cheek’, turning our face
not once, but repeatedly until, in effect, we take
their anger away.
Jesus always stood against those who maintained their right
to respect and, of whom he was highly critical, as his arguments with the Pharisees
clearly show. He condemns their precise, ‘unflawed
behaviour’, as they see it, particularly in their readiness
to take offence at what he preached. Their failure was that
they were too concerned about who they were, an ‘activity’
which consumed them so much that they failed to understand
who he was.
 In
1989, the American photographer, Andres Serrano was paid
for, and exhibited an extremely controversial work.
His subject was a plastic
crucifix submerged in a glass of his own urine,
controversially known as Piss Christ. Whilst it is
hardly a tasteful subject, the significance of what he was
attempting to portray was misunderstood by many, and
condemned by many Christians as blasphemous. However, it
was understood by one person, the Religious and art critic,
Sister Mary Beckett, who said that it was not blasphemous
but a statement of ‘what we have done to Christ’. In
essence, it took the incisive and spiritual mind of a humble
religious sister, dispossessed of worldly things, to see the
truth.
Far from being blasphemous, it is an irrevocable statement
of how sometimes we fail to surrender our sense of
importance and our dignity,
and all that we feel is due to us, in exchange for the
deeply beautiful moving expression of Christ’s sacrifice as
the profoundest expression of love, honour and respect in
our lives as Christians towards others. For all that may
happen to us, it is nothing in comparison to what happened
to Him, who gave His love and His life in exchange for His
dignity and self-respect
|
