The cry of anguish, the cry of hope

“With the weapons of love, God has defeated selfishness and death. His son Jesus is the door of mercy wide open to all.” – Pope Francis (27/03/16) Delivering his Urbi et Orbi message from the central loggia of St Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday afternoon, March 27, 2016, Pope Francis looked visibly disturbed. The past […]

“With the weapons of love, God has defeated selfishness and death. His son Jesus is the door of mercy wide open to all.” – Pope Francis (27/03/16)

Delivering his Urbi et Orbi message from the central loggia of St Peter’s Basilica on Easter Sunday afternoon, March 27, 2016, Pope Francis looked visibly disturbed. The past weeks of that month of March were filled with horrors of violence, death and destruction in different parts of the world. From Baghdad where bombs blew some 300 members of families apart as they celebrated Ramadan, to Istanbul, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Cameroon, Belgium and Nigeria, it was a tale of horror. For this reason, Pope Francis’ Easter afternoon message to the world was a distress cry to the God of Mercy, who raised his Son Jesus Christ from the dead, offering us “the comforting assurance that the abyss of death has been bridged and, with it, all mourning, lamentation and pain (cf. Rev. 21:4).” He thus prayed: “Along with our brothers and sisters persecuted for their faith and their fidelity to the name of Christ, and before the evil that seems to have the upper hand in the life of so many people, let us hear once again the comforting words of the Lord: ‘Take courage; I have conquered the world!’”
Drawing strength from the triumph of the risen Jesus over death, the pope prayed for an end to suffering, brutal crimes and bad news in the world. He urged all Christians to “draw closer to the victims of terrorism.” However, it would appear that rather than abate, the spate of violence is on the increase today. All over the world, we are witnessing staggeringly new incidents of atrocities committed in the name of God. For prophets of doom, our civilisation is on the verge of collapse. What the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted many years ago as ‘the clash of civilisations’ is falling upon us in ways that Huntington himself did not envisage. Religion has taken the centre stage today as the spinning force for a huge proportion of global crisis.
On July 26, 86-year-old Catholic priest, Father Jacques Hamel had his throat slit by two young Islamic fanatics in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen in France, while celebrating Holy Mass. It was almost like his blood being mingled with the blood of the Christ in the chalice. The two young men who killed Father Hamel arrived at the Church during morning Mass and stormed the building, taking five hostages inside. Sister Danielle, a nun who was in the Church at the time, said the slain priest was wearing his white vestments and was at the foot of the altar when “they forced him to get on his knees and not move. He tried to struggle, he knew what was happening.” The young boys, she said, were speaking Arabic and shouting, while slashing Father Hamel’s throat. They claimed to have acted on behalf of ISIS; and ISIS claimed responsibility for the brutality.
At a Mass said for the victims of the attack on July 27, 2016 in Paris, Catholic Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, appealed for hope as he remembered Father Hamel. Recalling the words of one of the scripture readings of the day from the prophet Jeremiah, the Cardinal said: “In this terrible time we’re going through, how can we make our own this cry to God of the prophet Jeremiah, in the midst of attacks of which he was the object?” He said that to cry to the Lord “is not to lack faith in God. It is, on the contrary, to continue to speak to him and to call upon him in the precise moment when events seem to call into question his power and his love. It is to continue to affirm our faith in him, our trust in the Face of love and mercy he has shown in his son Jesus Christ. Those who wrap themselves in the trappings of religion to mask their deadly project, those who want to proclaim to us a God of death, a Moloch who would rejoice in the death of a man and who would promise paradise to those who kill while invoking him, those people cannot expect humanity to yield to their mirage.”
In his homily, Cardinal Vingt-Trois recalled that “the hope written by God on the heart of man has a name: it is called life. Hope has a face, the face of Christ giving his life in sacrifice so that men may have life in abundance. Hope has a project, the project of gathering humanity into one people, not by extermination but by conviction and by the call to freedom. It is this hope in the midst of trial that forever blocks for us the path to despair, vengeance, and death.” For the Cardinal, “it’s this hope that animated the ministry of Father Jacques Hamel when he celebrated the Eucharist, during which he was savagely executed. It is this hope that sustains the Christians in the Middle East when they have to flee in the face of persecution and they choose to leave everything behind rather than renounce their faith.” This conviction, Vingt-Trois said, helps us to “resist the temptation to nihilism and a taste for death…refuse to become delirious with conspiracy theories and allow our society become gangrenous with the virus of suspicion.”
Pope Francis has called those who sow the seeds of hatred through the culture of death as “apostles of Babel.” Rather than cow in fear in the face of the atrocities of our day, we must stand together to confront the forces of evil in our midst. “Before the spiritual and moral abysses of mankind, before the chasms that open up in hearts and provoke hatred and death, only an infinite mercy can bring us salvation,” says Pope Francis. “Only God can fill those chasms with his love, prevent us from falling into them and help us to continue our journey together towards the land of freedom and life.”
In a world filled with violence, Jesus reminds us to pray for the conversion of evildoers. Evil can never have the last word, just as death did not have the last word in the life of Jesus. Thus, the lamentation of Jeremiah, his cry of anguish to God, “Why is my pain unceasing, my wounds incurable, refusing to be healed?”(Jer. 15:18) is our own lamentation too in the face of the evils that threaten us. But the Lord assures us of his presence just as he assured Jeremiah: “I will make you a fortress and a wall of bronze facing them; if they fight against you they will not overcome you; I am with you to free you and save you. I will redeem you from the wicked and free you from the hands of tyrants” (Jer. 15:20-21).This is the language of deliverance. Jesus re-echoes these sentiments in his high priestly prayer to God on, behalf of his disciples: “I do not ask you to remove them from the world but to keep them from the evil one” (Jn. 17:15). For those who believe in the God of Jesus Christ, this hope is trusting in God’s word as the prophet Jeremiah received it and relayed it.
When the famous German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was murdered by the Nazi in April 1945, published his book, The Cost of Discipleship, he was speaking to the heart of the demands of sacrifice and ethical consistency, when he said, “When Christ calls a man to follow him, he bids him come and die.” In paying the supreme sacrifice with his life, in imitation of his Master Jesus Christ, who suffered a cruel execution, Father Hamel courageously lives out the call to Christian discipleship with the power of his Christian heroism, that heroism which did not make him shirk from embracing martyrdom. May his blood invigorate the French soil and bring forth seeds of hope and reconciliation for our troubled world.
Father Emmanuel Ojeifo is a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja.