Context 
- The international news this week has continued to be dominated by the massacre at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. There have been many stories of people standing in solidarity with the victims including traditional Maori hakas by Bikers and schoolchildren. It has inspired others around the world to show their support including Manchester Christian Peter Graystone who stood outside his local mosque last Friday. Others have been distressed at the reluctance of social media to take down the footage of the attack being shared across the world.
- Some conservative Christian commentators have been suggesting that the most recent of ongoing attacks by Muslim Fulani tribesmen on Christian farmers in Nigeria have not received proportionate attention in the mainstream news. Although, other reports on this conflict suggest that it is not a straightforward religious one.
- Meanwhile a cyclone Idai has wreaked havoc in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe.
- On the same conservative news feed above a Nebraska farmer interpreted a flood that devastated his farm as ‘a sign from God’.
- And in Northern Ireland three young people are crushed waiting to get into a St Patrick’s night party.
Reflection
In any one week it is not difficult to identify tragic news stories and often stories close to home that are just as tragic to those affected but will never make the news headlines. How we convey such news, the interpretation that we put on it and how we respond tells more about us than it does about the story in the news.
In this week’s Gospel reading some people tell Jesus the shocking news about some fellow Galilean pilgrims who were massacred by the Roman Governor Pilate. This has obvious parallels to last week’s massacre of Muslims at prayer in Christchurch, New Zealand.
While there were many supportive words and acts, including from Christians the world over, there were others who were swift to offer ‘explanations’ of why such things happen, blaming all sorts of different people ranging across the political and religious spectrum, or who were equally swift to engage in what is referred to in Northern Ireland as ‘Whataboutery’, where people respond to news coverage or blame for one event, by saying ‘what about…’ before pointing at something else that they perceive balances out the horror, in this case with some conservative commentators pointing to recent attacks by Muslim Fulani militia on Nigerian Christians which have gone largely unreported in the western media, although other reports suggest that this conflict is a complex and protracted one.
The tragedy need not be directly caused by human hand. In the past we are familiar with some claiming that natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina were a judgement from God. Maybe that is what some were suggesting following the collapse of the Siloam Tower. Is that how we would interpret cyclone Idai and the devastation it has caused in already impoverished parts of Africa?
Meanwhile in Cookstown, Northern Ireland some young teenagers were killed in a crush waiting to get into a party on St. Patrick’s night. Again there was a massive outpouring of sympathy and support but there were also those on social media who were quick to blame not only organisers, and bouncers, but the young people themselves, and their parents, pointing out that many of those attending, including the victims, were under age.
How we engage with these and other stories is a matter of heart and mind. If our first thought is to find someone to blame, rather than feel sympathy for the victim and think what we might do to help, then perhaps we too, as Jesus suggests here, need to repent, or change our mindset, which is what repentance means, particularly if our mindset leads us to blame the victims or deflect the attention from them onto someone else that we think is more worthy of our sympathy.
The perishing that Jesus was talking about wasn’t necessarily about eternal judgement. The tendency to blame the Roman authorities or to see every natural disaster as judgement from God led inexorably to the Jewish rebellion against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem, a generation later. It was a bitter harvest of a particular mindset.
Our mindset will also produce a harvest in keeping with its nature.
G.K Chesterton famously contributed to a long running correspondence in a London newspaper on the subject of ‘What is wrong with the world?’ with the four-word response ‘Dear Sir, I am.’
Prayer
A prayer of lament shaped by some of the events above and other personal experiences in the past week. You could add others that reflect your local context:
O God, where were you
when the bullets started to fly
among people gathered for prayer
in a land where some had fled to be free
of religiously motivated violence?
O God, where were you
when Fulani Muslim Militia
attacked Christian farmers
over faith and farmland
where there isn’t enough good faith
or good farmland to go round?
O God, where were you
when young teenagers
out to celebrate their patron saint
in their own way
had their lives ended at the same age
that Patrick had been when captured
and hauled off as a slave to this
pagan island?
O God, where were you
when the winds of cyclone Idai
ripped across the dry soils of Africa
taking the lives and livelihoods
of those who had not been blessed with much
in the first place?
O God, where were you
when the man with Motor Neurone Disease
took his last laboured breath alone
with none of his family around him?
When the confused former teacher
went to the shops for bread
and couldn’t find her way home?
When the expectant mother
was told that the longed for child
within her womb had no heartbeat?
Where were you God?
Who’s to blame for this mess?
This pain?
Who’s going to pay and when?
O God, you were there all the time,
in hands and side pieced with bullets
rather than by nails and spear.
You stretched out your arms
to embrace all your hurting children
and call us to do the same.
Grant us your compassion,
and where we are present
may others know that you are there.
In Jesus name.
Amen.
Questions
- Why do bad things things happen to good people and vice versa?
- Have you ever been in a situation where you felt or said, ‘There but for the grace of God’? Did it change your thinking or behaviour?
All-age activity
Give out small pieces of coloured paper and pens, and invite people to write an appropriate greeting to be included in a card to be sent to a local mosque in an act of solidarity in the face of, not only the recent attack in Christchurch, but rising tensions in our communities because of various reasons.
Young people
Ask the young people to design and make the card into which the messages above will be pasted, using a large piece of card folded in two, tissue paper, and PVA glue. Scrunched up red tissue paper could be grouped together into the shape of a heart. White paper could be made into a dove of peace. Multi-coloured paper could make a bunch of flowers. Think carefully about what words should go on the front of the card.
David A. Campton is a Methodist minister, a broadcaster, and director of the ‘4 Corners Festival’. He is the superintendent of South and Central Belfast Circuit of the Methodist Church in Ireland, and the Belfast Central Mission. He sporadically blogs under the banner of Virtual Methodist.
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