Thought for the Day, 17 March 2008

Rev Dr Alan Billings

A contributor to Andrew Marr's Start the Week last Monday said it was a pity that the television series about Christ, The Passion - which began last night and continues all week - contained so much brutality. Wouldn't it be better to have a series about Christ's spiritual teaching, rather than dwell on the suffering? The gospels, of course, take the opposite view. They have some of his teachings, but they are just the prologue to the passion. Let me suggest one reason why.

We live in a society that essentially believes that the way we acquire meaning for ourselves is through activity - doing things, giving shape to things. The good in that is that we have learnt not to sit back in a resigned way as the passive victims of whatever fate throws at us. We have challenged what we were once told were the iron laws that dictated our destinies. We have taken into our own hands the matter of our health, of our economic well-being. We no longer believe that verse in the children's hymn, All things bright and beautiful, that told us

The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, God made them, high or lowly, And ordered their estate.

But activism has a down-side. It tricks us into thinking we can control everything. Then we lose the capacity for dealing with those situations where nothing further can be done - those calamities that can make achievement seem meaningless or absurd.

As a parish priest I have often seen good people brought to despair in the face of something they could not influence - the dementia of a loved one, their own wasting illness, the death of a child. And when the art of coping has not been learnt, denial has often been the means of escape from pain. Then when reality has to be faced, there comes despair and that awful feeling that God has abandoned us or is just not there. A culture of activism is not very good at dealing with defeats. We find sickness and dying very, very difficult.

One job of religion is to remind us of life's limitations and defeats. In Holy Week Christians reflect on them in the light of Christ's passion and in doing so find spiritual resources. So we watch his struggle to come to terms with what he has no power to change. In the Garden of Gethsemane he shrinks from the coming suffering, Let this cup pass from me. On the cross he feels abandoned by God.

But because Christianity sees God in this suffering man, we understand also that in the worst that can befall us, God is not absent but comes close. This is the very heart of the Christian faith. Not the assertion of God's sovereignty over us but the gospel of his solidarity with us. For how else except by keeping company with us could he succour us in our defeats?