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The Following Article appeared in The Guardian on Easter Eve (30th March) 2001
FACE to FAITH: The true “Defining Moment”
Through these last months there has been much talk about September 11th as “the Defining Moment” for our times and for the future, because that day’s atrocity was committed in and upon the United States of America, the Power whose interests currently reign supreme around the world.
To prepare to celebrate Easter is to be reminded that for Christians “the Defining Moment” for our times and for the future remains the Resurrection of Jesus; and that his is the Power that reigns supreme around the world – the world which Christians, with many others, understand as God’s creation. For
people of other Faiths there are, similarly, other “Defining Moments”, fundamental points of reference in the light of which everything and everyone else is to be understood.
Christian believing and living is rooted in the conviction that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead “on the third day” after his terrible death by crucifixion just outside the walls of Jerusalem. Historically speaking, there is no point when that has not been the heart and spring of Christian faith. Nor is it possible to account for the character of the earliest Christian communities, or for their astonishing growth and resilience from the Faith’s first decades down to today, or for the structure of Christian belief, without the Resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus’ first followers, in the earliest years that were critically important for the foundations of all subsequent Christian believing, were like him Jews; so they were initially led to understand the unique event into which they had been drawn in Jewish terms. Here was the longed-for new beginning for God’s creation, the world made new. Here
was a new “exodus” in which God’s people, charged with representing him to all his creation, was founded afresh and renewed. Here was a foretaste of the conquest of death and of the new life with God for which people longed. Here was an affirming of Jesus teaching, and of the manner of his death no less than that of his life, as “ the power of God and the wisdom of God” – not the folly
and the shame that sensible people thought it to be. Here the men and the women whom Jesus himself had drawn to be with him, and those whom they drew in turn, found themselves empowered to behave as he had behaved, to pray and heal and serve, to challenge authority in God’s name and to suffer as he had done.
Today the large majority of the world’s Christians are like the Christians of the first decades of the Faith. Most are neither “white”, nor quite well off, nor relatively secure. Very many have little if any experience of freedom from the threat of hunger or sickness, violence or disaster. Only a minority are North American or Western
European; most live in the world’s pressure-points of political and physical insecurity, in the still marginalised and economically disadvantaged states of Central and South America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Sub-continent, South-east Asia, the Pacific and Eastern Europe. Some, a dwindling number and almost all of them Palestinians, still live in what Christians everywhere think of as the
Holy Land; and there are ancient, faithful Christian communities in countries like Iraq and Turkey.
Wherever Christians this Easter are celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus, we shall be reminded of our belief that this is the world’s Defining Moment, and that the one who was crucified is the world’s most significant Power. Whether the day-to-day realities and anxieties of our lives are those of the Congo or of Myanmar, of Western Europe or
of Pakistan or of the USA, we shall again be reminded that we are people caught up into living the new life of Jesus whatever the hardships that face us; people who have been shown, in Jesus and in all that has stemmed from him, what this world - God’s creation - can be really like;
people whose hope for the future is based ultimately in Jesus – we know, as it were, the character of the floor that is under the matting of everyday experience on which we are standing; and it is our calling to find ways of revealing to others the reality that we have been shown.
This calling to reveal the truth about God’s world and about God’s will has always involved addressing those in authority, those with political power. Think of Jesus with the authorities of his day and before Pilate, of Stephen with those who stoned him to death – and then of countless Christians down the centuries and in our own times. All
three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, believe that rulers are to be held accountable to God for human society and its well-being; they are God’s regents with the task of sustaining justice and peace according to God’s intention for his creation.
Wherever Christians are celebrating the Resurrection of Christ this Easter, we shall be remembering events long ago in Jerusalem; and the Gospels, that we shall be reading, will be full of resonances with the terrible realities of life for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and for people of all three Faiths, in the Holy Land today. Ancient prayers “for the peace of Jerusalem”, and for the justice which is the only soil in which peace can grow, will further stimulate millions all around the world to pray that American, British and European governments, in proper alliance with Islamic states, will give the highest priority to finding a just resolution of the corrosively destructive situation in the Holy Land - for which, we in this country should always remember, the UK bears
such a large share of responsibility in the light of the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate.
It matters supremely that we stop thinking of September 11th as “the Defining Moment” of our times and for our future; and that those of us who are Christians continue to discern and to share the implications of our conviction that the true “Defining Moment” was and remains the Resurrection of Jesus. |