Keith’s Blog

Escaping the Gutter

There have been relatively few moments in my life when I have felt utterly shaken to my core – either positively or negatively. One was a Thursday afternoon standing in the car park of my local supermarket as I realised that the pieces of meat lying all around me were all that was left of the two young men who had, moments before, been carrying a bomb into the store. The device had prematurely detonated not long before I had arrived at the scene. I think I was nine. Another, much more positive one, was the moment at that small bible class in Derry when I first understood what the message of Jesus was all about and how it called me to an absolute surrender of my heart and life to the God who had created me and who, on an ancient, brutal cross, had sacrificed himself so that I could be free. That was pretty great.

The one I’ve been thinking about this week, though, as I’ve begun my preparation for our Easter Sunday Morning service here in MCC, occurred whilst sitting in a class room in the United Theological College of the West Indies in Kingstown, Jamaica. It was September 1989. I don’t even remember the person’s name any more, but he was a white South African who had travelled to the Caribbean to collect a peace award on behalf of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the famous Bishop of Johannesburg.

Archbishop Tutu had already received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his outspoken role in challenging the government of South Africa on Apartheid. Over the next few years, he would have several other awards added in addition to this. However, since his passport had been revoked, and he was thus unable to travel to Jamaica to collect this particular one for himself, my lecturer for the day had come on his behalf. We had been studying the Kairos document in class, a theological response to Apartheid first issued in 1985, and it was therefore great to have the opportunity to hear about the South African situation from someone who actually lived and ministered there.

We were all expecting his lecture to address Archbishop Tutu and his community’s role in the ongoing struggle against the oppression there but his very first point in explaining their fierce opposition to Apartheid caught us all completely by surprise. It has never yet lost its magnificent impact on my personal thinking. “Let me begin by stating,’ he said, ‘that one of the primary reasons black South Africans feel they must oppose this terrible sanction on human existence that exits within their nation, is so that their white brothers and sisters can be freed from the tyranny of Apartheid.’ I was in a class of about thirty students where I was the token Caucasian. As I did my own double take, I could see it echoed in the faces of every single student around me. Had he really meant what he had just said? It was not the whites who needed to be freed from Apartheid. They were the beneficiaries of it! It was the blacks who needed to be freed! And just as we were all gearing up to raise our hands and correct him, he quickly followed by saying, ‘You see, the gospel proclaims to us that you cannot hold someone in the gutter without being there yourself. Thus the liberation we are advocating in South Africa is a liberation needed by us all. It is out of love that we call white South Africans to dismantle and free themselves, as well as black South Africans, from the Apartheid regime.’

For ten years I had been struggling with how to respond as a Christian to the sectarianism that was rampant within my own land. Because of my own experiences growing up in Derry, I was all too aware of the impact of the troubles. I so wanted to see peace, to know freedom for my brothers and sisters who had suffered so terribly in my country. But what was I to say as a Christian? How should those in positions of influence and power be responding in the face of such brutal killings and ongoing community strife? What did the gospel have to say in the midst of our three decades of division and pain? It seemed all too clear to me that in Ireland it was every tribe for themselves. Protestants were advocating the rights of Protestants. Catholics were advocating the rights of Catholics. Unionists were fighting on behalf of Unionists. Nationalists were doing the same. But how could we, as followers of Christ, think and speak, act and respond to this systemic alienation that was tearing our nation apart in a way that would adequately bear witness to the gospel and to the Kingdom it points us to? Well, right there, and then, I knew that I now had an answer to my questions. I remember almost nothing about the rest of what my lecturer had to say but I will never forget how God spoke to me in those few opening sentences.

This was what I had been missing about the heart of the gospel! This is what I had failed to realise Jesus was offering himself for as he breathed his last on that forsaken hill. This is what these words on the cross were all about, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’ I had always wrestled with what Jesus had said. What did he mean? How could Jesus be so naïve? Of course they knew what they were doing! The Jewish leaders knew exactly what they had done. The Roman soldiers knew exactly what they were doing. For goodness sake, they were sneering and mocking and laughing as they condemned and brutalised and killed the only sinless person ever to have walked this earth! How on earth could Jesus say they did not know what they were doing?

But sitting in that corrugated, tin-clad class room in downtown Jamaica, that day, I finally understood. The gospel was truly about liberation for everyone! For the first time I could see it clearly that oppressors are captive to their own oppression; those brutalising others are, themselves, brutalised; those filled with hate are ravaged by that same hate; those fighting against the ‘other’ side are in fact fighting against themselves! It is just that they do not realise it. I finally understood that standing against those who perpetrated tyranny and murder, racism and sectarianism could actually be, in fact needs to be, an act of love. And furthermore, I could finally see that what we are called to advocate as followers of Jesus can never be limited to the well-being or freedom of any single group or tribe or nation – even our own. Those who would follow after the Son of God must set their course, as he did, to the freeing of all – to Jew as well as Gentile, to white as well as black, to rich as well as poor, to men as well as women, to Catholics as well as Protestants. We can never settle as emissaries of the Kingdom of God for anything less than the establishment of peace and freedom for all. For as Jesus saw so clearly, and as his followers in South Africa advocated so courageously, none of us can ever truly be free until we all are. This is part of what praying that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven is all about. We cannot hold anyone in the gutter without remaining there ourselves.