BBC Radio 4 2016-03-23

BBC Radio 4 2016-03-23

Good morning.

It is, I think, a sad truth that though yesterday’s dreadful atrocities in Brussels shock us, they don’t actually surprise us. Of course we find images of the injured and wounded, and of people fleeing in panic, and thoughts of the dead and their families, distressing. But while these events may distress us, they don’t surprise us as if coming out of the blue. Far from it – we have come to expect such happenings as part of the fabric of modern life. So we don’t ask whether there will be another terrorist incident; we ask ‘when’ and ‘where’. I am old enough to remember as a child at football matches, hearing announcements of a bomb-scare over the loud-speaker system and the request that everyone check under their seats. I am not sure that there has been any time since then, when the expectation of such threats has ever completely gone away.

In the story of Holy Week, which Christians tell again this week, there is a particular incident which speaks to the presumption that violence has an almost inevitable place in our existence. The Gospels refer to a custom that the Governor would release a prisoner at the time of the Passover festival. The choice, it seems, is between Jesus and Barabbas - a bandit in one version, in another, one of a group of murderous rebels. And when the prevaricating Pilate offers them Jesus, the crowd shout in reply – not this man but Barabbas.

The Gospels don’t really explain this preference. But many Christian congregations will be made to ponder it for themselves this week, when they will not simply listen to these stories, but take part in them. There is in many places a tradition of dramatic renditions of the Gospels in which congregations become the voice of the crowd, themselves yelling ‘not this man, but Barabbas’. And as they find these words on their own lips, they will be forced to wonder where such a cry comes from. Why is evil chosen over good? Why is a murderer preferred to the innocent and pacific Jesus?

If we examine ourselves, I expect we may find a sneaking – or not so sneaking – regard for the man of action, even if the action is criminal and cruel. Think in our culture of what is very often tantamount to the celebration of the lives of notorious crooks, such as the Great Train Robbers, no matter that they were violent and ruthless. It is as if we can’t quite rid ourselves of the thought that violence really does belong to the fabric of the world, that it is just the way it goes, that it is to be expected – almost accepted. Of course, Holy Week invites us not just to face up to this thought, but to confront and reject it. It invites us not to accept the world we know only too well, one constructed according to the logic of violence, of strike and counter-strike, of grievance and retaliation – with all its sorry consequences - but to imagine a quite different world, founded on forgiveness, reconciliation and peace.

First broadcast 23 March 2016