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On March 24th, 1980, The Archbishop of San Salvador celebrated a funeral mass in the Chapel of divine Providence Hospital.
A champion of the poor, his sermon took its inspiration from the parable of the wheat:
Those who surrender to the service of the poor through love of Christ will live like the grain of wheat that dies…The harvest comes because of the grain that dies.. We know that every effort to improve society, above all when society is so full of injustice and sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.”
Moments later, Archbishop Oscar Romero lay dead – shot by a paid assassin of the Government. His crime was to speak up for the poor and to fight against injustice at a time when El Salvador was in the grip of tyranny by just 14 landowners who had the Military Government in their pocket. The majority of the country – the poor – were enslaved, being paid unjust wages and condemned to living in squalor and poverty. Anyone who opposed the landowners were hounded, imprisoned and often murdered by either the military or by paid death squads made up of mercenaries who roamed the countryside killing, raping and torturing with impunity. A special target were priests and nuns who sought to help the poor and who might be fighting for human rights and human dignity.
Oscar Romero had come to believe that “to know God is to do justice” and he tried very hard to put this into practice, not only in practical help for the poor but in outspoken sermons and documented demands that the Government should turn aside from its tyranny. He sought International help by taking detailed reports to the Pope in Rome. He appealed to the then American President, Jimmy Carter, to stop sending military aid to the Salvadorian Government though it took his own death to achieve this. Oscar Romero (whose feast day was yesterday) was amongst those public Church figures who stood out against oppression, believing it to be laid upon them by the Gospel. And like the Christ they served, they became victims of oppressors who found them inconvenient, tiresome and troublesome.
Today the Church enters Passiontide and once again our focus becomes the Cross of Christ and our Lord’s sacrifice on behalf of the whole human race. Christians throughout the world are being bidden to follow the ‘Way of the Cross’ and, as here in St. John’s, there are many opportunities to reflect on Christ’s life-giving death and passion, through Holy week Services which, beginning next Sunday, Palm Sunday, take us through the events of our Lord’s last week on earth and beyond to the glory of the Resurrection.
Nothing is more ‘converting’ than the Way of the Cross if it is entered into fully and with a heart open to what God longs to teach us through a meditation of the Holy Week events. As a way of deepening our personal faith it cannot be beaten and it always saddens me that so many Christians by-pass this special and holy week – not only because it can renew our faith but also because without Holy Week, Easter’s meaning is diluted. St. John of the Cross, the great spiritual writer of the 15th century spoke a great truth when he said
Those who seek not the Cross of Christ, seek not the glory of Christ.
As well as the personal renewal of faith, Holy Week teaches us something very important about the nature of Christian belief. To be authentic, real and genuine it must involve a cost.
The poet T.S. Eliot coined the phrase Costing not less than everything and it is those, like Oscar Romero, who lay their lives on the line for their Christian convictions who pay the everything demanded of us by the Gospel. For people like Oscar Romero the Way of the Cross isn’t a religious devotion – it’s a way of life – THE way of life.
We are able to live quite a comfortable faith and for us there are options – we can, for example, decide to go with the Church on its Holy Week pilgrimage or we can decide not to do so. For people like Oscar Romero there is no option – to know God is to do justice - to know God is to follow Him to the Cross made present in the suffering ones of this world and to seek to touch them with Christ’s Crucified love – a Love which cost Jesus everything. It cost Oscar Romero his life too and he joins the long list of Christians who, in the 20th century went to their death for their conviction that Jesus Christ is Lord.Today, the bi-centennial anniversary of William Wilberforce’s Bill to outlaw slavery we are reminded that what Oscar Romero died for was what the campaigners of Stop the Traffik and our own Bishop’s Lenten Campaign Proclaim Freedom are fighting for still. The ending of slavery on all its levels demands of us a solidarity with the world’s poor and oppressed. People like Malong who at the age of twelve was kidnapped by raiders who descended on his village burning houses and seizing cattle. His entire family was rounded up as if they were cattle and taken to the northern part of the Sudan. There for 12 years he was a slave tending animals. When he accidentally lost 3 camels his Arab ‘owner’ slapped him so hard he became deaf in one ear. He was made to speak only Arabic and he was forced to convert to Islam. When he was eventually freed he had to learn his own language again but what was truly wonderful for him was that he was free to choose being a Christian again.
Costing not less than everything - the Cross comes in many shapes and sizes but it’s meaning is the same – it is the place where love is crucified but where love is triumphant.William Wilberforce lived to see something of that triumph. He was not called to give up his life for Christ but he was certainly asked to give his life to Christ and that giving became a kind of crucifixion as he fought against the vested interest that did not want him to succeed in freeing slaves from bondage because that would affect profit-margins. Year after year for 20 years he battled to have the voice of the enslaved poor heard and he never gave in. His faith would not allow it. The Gospel demanded that he keep trying. The Cross of Christ insisted that he must go on working for justice: to know God is to do justice and eventually justice prevailed.
Wilberforce did not die for his faith but he knew its cost – a life’s work full of cost – he gave everything. The Way of Cross was not for him a pious pilgrimage. It was a demanding, heartbreaking struggle of a journey on which not only his personal conviction stood or fell but the lives of those millions taken into slavery stood and fell. It was a cost Wilberforce was prepared to pay. And he paid it because He loved God .
Loving God whatever the cost is the theme of today’s Gospel. I love this beautiful story from Bethany where Jesus is anointed with fragrant perfume. It was such a waste and Judas was quick to point out how the perfume, if sold, could have helped the poor. A noble sentiment and given what I have been talking about this morning, I ought to applaud him and exhort you to behave like Judas – except, as we all know Judas was a man of mixed-up motives and even if John’s aside is the post Easter judgement of the Church upon him we can be certain that he wouldn’t have been one to leap aboard a Stop the Traffik campaign.
Nor should we let Judas’s comment deflect from the act because it was extravagant – the ointment was costly and it was probably part of Mary’s dowry without which she would be very much the poorer – but like so many poor people she did not count the cost – she just wanted to do something to show that she understood our Lord’s love so freely given and somehow also she sensed that more would soon be demanded of him. In another version of this story – in Mark’s Gospel – Jesus spells this out when he said that she had anointed his body beforehand for its burial.
Mary’s action was one of love that does not count the cost and which gives everything. And she gives it to the One who gives all – who will die on a Cross because He can do no other if he is to prove God’s love for humankind. Did Mary then walk the way of the Cross in the same sense that Oscar Romero and others like him did? It could be argued that there is no connection between the two ways of witnessing to Christ. There was no life in danger here but our Lord’s own. Whilst what she did angered Judas (and in Mark’s Gospel others) it was not a political or inflammatory statement against tyrannical and oppressive regimes which would lead to her own death. And yet there is a connection. What binds Oscar Romero, William Wilberforce, those who are fighting to end slavery today and Mary of Bethany together is love. Not simply the love given by all these and countless more but an understanding of love received.
The Cross of Christ binds all together in a great act of sacrificial love – God’s love – poured out for all – poured out for rich and for poor, for bound and for free, for oppressed and for oppressor. (Oscar Romero’s dying words were cross-like words ‘forgive my assassin’.) Whatever we are called to do as we attempt to walk the Passiontide Way of the Cross – we are called to a sacrificial and generously extravagant life of love. It may not be a life which will end in murdered death (God forbid!) but it will be, or should be, a life which is about giving – and giving everything in love’s service.
Eliot, you see, is so right – such love costs not less than everything. That is what it cost Christ. His followers should expect nothing less. If we can learn that this Passiontide we shall learn a great lesson and it will result not only in our personal salvation but in our joining in the struggle for the human heart which includes justice for all -because to know God is to do justice - for everyone – simply Everyone, regardless of colour, class, creed or gender and it includes justice for ourselves too – for so many are trapped in a tyranny of their own making and we all need to know that Christ’s love from the Cross frees us all.