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Good Morning,

We go to bed hearing the news that schools and hospitals can be bombed with impunity; and we rise to the news that an opposition leader has been arrested in a country led by another supposed ‘strongman’.

I wish I could ignore the rising rancour, and all the ‘strongmen’ living rent free inside my head 24/7, but I fear that if I do so I might become one of those frogs that gets boiled alive because it got used to the rising temperature of the water.

Because surely the temperature of our water is rising. A dominant, hostile animus prevails over many countries; the loudmouths have grabbed the conch and are shouting down and suppressing all criticism.

Naked Power is having its day; it stands in front of the mirror and admires its weapons, proud of its sneery contempt for people who stand in the way of its ways. And tells us that laws, checks and balances, politeness, are for the weak.

These days are like the ones the Psalmist described, where ‘the wicked strut freely about, and what is vile is honoured by men.’ It is getting harder to imagine a historical alternative to what is happening or see a better way.

Where is this God who, the Psalmist tells us ‘sees and stands with the oppressed’ wherever they are? Oh, for a heavy-handed God, I think.

Seeing people in the rubble of a blown-up house, or a man cowering on the floor of a prison cell, makes me want to call for a god packing heavy weapons - A Jack Reacher god - who blows the bad guys away.

But then I remember: oh yes, I don’t think that’s the God I believe in.
The God that the Psalmist cried out to in his anguish and who, for Christians, Jesus embodied had a different response to all this unchecked violence.

This God, radically unconcerned with popularity, profit or power, offered a sense of critical irony (the kind that puts oppressive power in its place) and also a hope that such power does not have the last word.

Standing before the forces that would kill him, Jesus depowered this power by refusing to rise to its bait or fall to its standards, and instead transformed the weapon used to kill him into a symbol of a better way.

In doing so, he demonstrated that love triumphs over injustice, over oppression, over contempt, all the worst that people can do. And that this is the power that will change us, as people and as nations.

He reminded us of the simple premise that we do not secure our position on this earth at the expense of anyone else. And then He showed us what that looks like.

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