Vicar's Letter - April/May 2004 - the bomb attack on Madrid
Good Friday in Madrid this year is likely to be a harrowing
time for many thousands of folks as it reprises in their minds the terrible
events on the train system a few weeks ago.
Commentators have suggested it should have been a whole lot worse than it
was, had the terrorist’s organisation fallen properly into place; but I think
most people would consider that it was quite bad enough.
The shock that those terrible events sent around Europe and
the world was immense and we are still reflecting on their full significance.
Almost forgotten now, amidst all the discussion about the political and
security implications is the suffering and grief that is being nursed in the
hearts and minds of huge numbers of folks together with the anxieties and fears
of so many more who, for one reason or another were near misses.
To expect that Easter Day will provide the soothing of
their pain and discomfit is optimistic indeed, even for the most devout of
Christians. It will take rather
longer than a few weeks for people to be reconciled to the Paschal proclamation
that in the Resurrection of Christ, we see that good will triumph over evil and
that there is beyond death something better and more glorious that we can know
during our mortality.
None-the-less, our leaders are all encouraging us to look
to a time beyond the present uncertainties about our security – to a time of
resurrection in the world where terror has been slain and we can live in peace.
The passiontide of this aspiration is the War on Terror, which will carry
us to victory over the lust for death. Like
Christ’s own Passion, it is a necessary stage along the way; during which time
many prices can be portrayed as worth paying in pursuit of the glorious goal.
However, we ought to bear in mind that, as Saint Paul tells
us, at our mortal death on this earth life is changed not taken away.
The realms of life after our mortal sojourn has finished are not simply a
pristine version of worldly society. In
detail we do not really know what to expect after resurrection; it is a trip
into the unknown.
The same was true of Jesus’ earthly ministry.
The growing expectations that surrounded His activities that He would
lead some uprising against the yoke of Roman occupation and, perhaps, a
reformation of the somewhat corrupt religious elite, were to be disappointed.
Maybe, it was such disappointed hopes that led Judas Iscariot to do what
he did.
The coalition of the willing, as it likes to see itself,
may have it in its power to initiate a process, but it cannot dictate where it
will end. Caiaphas and/or Pontius
Pilate must have thought that with the execution of Christ, the problem would go
away. However, as hindsight tells
us, the Crucifixion set in hand a course of events that saw the establishment of
Christ as a worldwide movement, whilst both Governor and High Priest were slowly
swept away.
The Americans and those who with them set out to redeem
Iraq were rightly confident in the overwhelming power of their military might.
However, if they imagined that a grateful Iraqi people would embrace a
Western style democracy, allow their land to be dotted with NATO airbases and
open up a chain of MacDonalds, they must be sadly disappointed.
In the old days of colonialism, of course, the occupying power could have
brutally repressed the indigenous populace until the people acquiesced, but that
is hardly an option today. The
interim constitution is unlikely to be the last word in the developments of that
country and it is difficult to believe currently that the new Iraq is going to
be very much more congenial to America than was the old one in the dying days of
the Hussein hegemony.
We have set our foot on a path along which we can only continue. Hopefully it will bring us the end of the present precarious stability in the world. However, we cannot yet know what the new order will look like. The fall of the Spanish government may be but the first fruits of this new political dispensation.
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