I reflect upon the words I shared just a few months ago regarding my trip down to hurricane devastated New Orleans. It was in my response I wrestled with one of the toughest questions I have come to encounter as a Christian.
In the book of Exodus, God hears the cries of his people in slavery and oppression. In Psalms, God hears his people weep beside the river in Babylon. God hears the cry...but do we as the flesh and blood, the body of Christ, do we hear the cries, more precisely, do I hear their cries?
It's been almost 5 months since that trip, and given the excitement of school, I have slowly placed this struggle to the side. Only to have it slowly revealed once again through "Jesus Wants to Save Christians" as part of the book study for sunday school. The refreshed approach by Rob Bell and Don Golden, along side with the notes written by my best friend on the T'shuva blog revamped the question circulating in my head, What happens when we don't hear the cry?
Bell and Golden approach it this way: when we don't hear the cry, the sin will become a system of oppression of the people, which we could slowly claim to be entitlement for us to continue this system, literally, the cycle becomes a closed system which continues to feed itself. We become the oppressors some more, and become a even greater oppressor.
But what about the people that cry out that we ignore or don't hear? I finally got an answer today. In Jean Vanier's book "Becoming Human" he writes something he saw at a psychiatric hospital filled with hundreds of children with severe disabilities that were just left in their cots. It was completely silent.
Hundreds of children.
Completely silent.
Silent.
No one was crying.
Vanier explains this strange scenario, "When they realize that nobody cares, that nobody will answer them, children no longer cry. It takes too much energy. We cry out only when there is hope that someone may hear us."
No one cares...
Hence it is silent...
Can God hear their cries?
Perhaps silence is the ultimate truth.
Silence.
Frederick Buechner in "Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale" writes this: "The preaching of the Gospel is a telling of the truth or the putting of a sort of frame of words around the silence that is truth because truth in the sense of fullness, of the way things are...."
Silence as a way to express reality. The gospel is this. A silent of some sort before the news of redemption is poured out. A silence, that tells us something is very wrong in the world. The gospel as a tragedy begins with silence.
Perhaps this is why it says, "Be silent and know that I am God."
Or that when Elijah went up to the mountain, God was not found in the midst of fire or earthquake or the rushing wind. But in the gentle whisper.
In the silence we hear the tragedy of the world.
In the silence we hear the cries.
In the silence, our souls cry out.
Then we come to understand why the gospel is the the "good news".
Because it is the silence, that God hears our cry.
Full Post
