Posted by Cathy Taggart However, what particularly concerns me nowadays is what all this implies for us as we grapple with thorny moral issues such as euthanasia, abortion, foetal stem cell research, etc. The Catholic Church, and some other religious bodies, tend to staunchly oppose these new developments, although many people take issue with the Church’s position, since “surely a compassionate God doesn’t want people to suffer”. I don’t want to go into the rights and wrongs of these difficult issues, but I, too, would have thought that God doesn’t want people to suffer. Does being a Christian – taking up one’s cross – mean that we should be more willing than other people to embrace suffering of any kind? Or should we only embrace the sort of suffering that comes from devoting our lives to God’s kingdom, to opposing whatever dehumanizes people and causes suffering? I would have thought the latter! If that is what Church leaders are intending to convey to us, they need to make their position clearer.
on April 10, 2006, 4:40 pm
Now that we are in Holy Week, it might be a good time to bring up something which has long bothered me and which I’m hoping you, Kevin, or some-one else “out there” might be able to help me sort out. As we are particularly conscious of at this time of year, a very central part of being a disciple of Jesus is our willingness to take up our cross and follow him. Over the centuries, it seems this has come to mean that we accept whatever suffering comes our way – we even have the well-worn expression, “one’s cross”, meaning one’s particular bundle of troubles or difficulties. Yet, if you read the Gospels, this doesn’t seem to be what Jesus was talking about at all! Of course, in the early Church, following Jesus could literally mean facing death, as Jesus himself did. But even apart from this, taking up one’s cross in the Gospel sense seems to imply that it is something which we take up willingly; it seems to mean embracing the difficulties and disadvantages that come from living according to the values of God’s kingdom, not those of this world. I strongly suspect that once Christianity became an “official” religion, it was used as a tool for keeping people in their place, rather than challenging the mainstream values which put them in that place! In the past, people were encouraged to accept a grossly inequitable society on the basis that God had supposedly ordered it that way and put everyone in their proper place. As children, we were taught to “offer up” our sufferings (certainly not to question them!), and I think there is still some of that attitude around.
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