THINKING ANEW:SOME YEARS AGO a journalist observed that the commercial world had borrowed treasured Christian words and images and stripped them of worthwhile meaning. Paradise had become two weeks' holiday on a Caribbean island and the Promised Land a duty-free shop at the end of a runway.
As for mission - well every organisation had to have a mission statement which was merely a statement of intent. The journalist, a committed Christian, felt that the church was losing the communications battle.
But communicating the faith is not easy when it comes to making sense of some of the scripture readings used in liturgy. For example tomorrow we have a reading which seems to belong to another world. An Ethiopian eunuch is sitting in a chariot reading a Hebrew bible when along comes Philip the evangelist who ends up baptising him. What could that possibly have to do with the problems facing us today? Is it relevant? The answer is Yes when we dig beneath the surface - perhaps in the sermon - and discover real human tragedy; the eunuch is struggling with the problem of innocent suffering and wondering what faith has to say about it. This man, who was something like minister of finance to the Queen of Ethiopia, was reading words from Isaiah about an innocent victim: "As a sheep led to the slaughter or a lamb before its shearer is dumb, so he opens not his mouth."
This was relevant because as a eunuch he had been the victim of a practice, cruel beyond words. He knew what it was to experience humiliation, to be an innocent victim. He could identify with Isaiah's victim who "in his humiliation justice was denied him."
Philip listened and went on to tell him "the good news about Jesus", that the humiliation of the victim that Isaiah spoke of was not the end; the final word was the resurrection of Jesus Christ which was God's vindication of innocent victims for all time.
The eunuch was the victim of an accepted practice of which there are various examples in the world today. His is the story of every innocent victim searching for answers: women in forced marriages, girls subjected to genital mutilation, children abandoned on waste dumps in South America and so on.
The Very Rev Michael Mayne who retired as dean of Westminster Abbey in 1996 thought deeply about innocent suffering, other people's and his own. His concern for Aids victims and for Aids carers was intense. Diana, Princess of Wales, was one of those carers who valued his support.
He knew what it was to suffer, for when he was a child his father, a priest, threw himself from his own church tower leaving a brief note and £40 in the bank. His mother had a hard life making ends meet.
In his middle years he had a breakdown which he wrote about in A Year Lost and Foundpointing out the difficulty people have believing in an all-powerful God who is personal and loving yet tolerates suffering and unfairness. But he pointed to the significance of Jesus - God in human terms, not up there, far off and against us but with us and for us. "Either God was not in Christ and the cross is the ultimate symbol of all meaningless that can destroy us . . . or God was in Christ and the cross is the final word of a God who shares the pain and the dirt, the loneliness and the weakness and the death we may be called upon to experience ourselves."
That has been the audacious claim of Christians from the beginning and it remains a core belief of Christianity today. Without the Jesus dimension we have little to offer those who suffer but sympathy. Jesus always taught that there was more, much more. And on the cross he dared to speak of paradise - the real paradise.
"God is the God of promise. He keeps his word even when that seems impossible; even when the circumstances seem to point in the opposite." - Colin Urquhart.
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