No One and Nothing Matures to Perfection Without Pain or Something Similar to Pain

There are several expressions in English which have the same meaning from the Christian perspective as the title of this reflection. They are: “There is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday”; “There is no life without death”;.”No authentic Christianity without the Cross”, etc., etc. They all sound like paradoxes or expressions of seeming contradiction. But they are expressions of truth, of the mystery which we call paschal.

Now we ask, is this principle of Christian transformation applicable to the political situation of our country today? I think so.

If so, to achieve authentic progress through system change, that is, to mature to perfection, the country as a whole must suffer? Yes. But the majority of our people are already suffering, even to the point of death, the burden of painful poverty, sickness and different forms of marginalization and the horrors of terrorism.

Yes. But they suffer due to social injustice, not because as a whole they are Christians. We have not yet suffered because of our Christian faith. Does this mean we should suffer like the Christians of the early Church? Yes.

Sadly, there was a moment, a recently God-sent moment, when we were supposed to suffer the pain of the insult and ridicule of our sacred beliefs and our spiritual leaders. Yes, sadly we did not. We just looked away or smiled or maybe squirmed in disgust or rationalized the incidents as unfortunate.

As a whole we did not feel the pain and our holy rage was not aroused when it could have inspired thousands of us to publicly declare like Peter and the Apostles, “We have decided to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).

What could be the form of such disobedience of the people to the rulers of today? In God’s mysterious wisdom the behavior of these men could have been, and can still be, God’s blessing in disguise, so to say. There would be several forms of such disobedience to the many forms of injustices, a disobedience inspired by faith in the Risen Lord. For sure, that would not be allowed, and as a consequence many Christians would be arrested and jailed.

But why did it not happen? Because for the whole majority of our Christian people our religious faith is not worth suffering and dying for. Why?

Personally I think perhaps something is wrong with the way we understand and live our faith. It is not a faith that does justice.

We continue the reflection next week.