The Messenger - April 2008 - Editorial Mercy and Compassion
By John Looby, SJ - 01 April 2008
Some months ago a British teacher was jailed in the Sudan for insulting religion when her pupils named a teddy bear Muhammad. The punishment could have been much harsher and in fact, she was pardoned and deported within eight days.
The secularist world was appalled and critical; having marginalized religion it fails to see what the fuss is about. Christians are critical at the way religion has been marginalized in our secular world, and profoundly disturbed by the harshness of the sentence.
Christians and Muslims alike share a profound sense of the awesome majesty of God, and we recognize the Muslim reverence for God when they pray prostrate on the ground five times daily. That was the way the Jews prayed from the times of Abraham and Moses, right up to the time of Christ; he and the early Christians probably also prayed to his Father in that way.
With the coming of Christ a radically new relationship emerged between God and man. Now when God the Father looked at the human race, he was aware of one among us of whom he could say, ‘This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased.’ And when he raised Jesus from the dead, not only are we reconciled with God through him, we are promised the fullness of the resurrection through faith in him. And as long as Christ remains true God and true man, that relationship will never end.
The prophets had really expected God to punish the human race but in Christ, God showed mercy and compassion. Christ repeatedly said that if we have received mercy, we in turn should be merciful to our brothers and sisters; we all share the same nature human with Christ. Love God and your neighbour as yourself, he said. Actually he went further as Paul of Tarsus discovered. Paul was punishing Christians, but when he was blinded by a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul was accused by Christ of persecuting him. Paul never forgot that what he did to others, he did to Christ.
When we learned that the British teacher might be punished with forty lashes, Christians believe that what is done to her, is done to Christ. The reverence for the human person has grown from that belief. The memory of his passion, death and resurrection we have just celebrated, is a reminder that Christ suffers when his brothers and sisters suffer: the young lives destroyed by drugs, the women and children victims in human trafficking, the homeless of our towns and cities. Christ wanted to cure; in his memory the Father wants to wipe away the tears and renew them with eternal life.
John Looby, SJ