We had hoped…
An Easter message from Bishop Harold:
The dashing of hopes is one of the most devastating things which can happen to any human being or in any society. It has happened on a major scale in places like South Sudan and Syria, and we look on and wonder how the human spirit can survive when there appears to be no future.
Here in Northern Ireland, the 20th Anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement has become a kind of anniversary of unfulfilled hopes. I remember being in the TV studio on that day, 10 April 1998, early in my episcopate. There was a palpable sense of a new future where the impossible became possible. It would be a future where the different cultural, religious and political traditions in Northern Ireland found blessing from each other, and together created a better place. It would be a future of prosperity, where our children would be glad to live and move and have their being in this place. It would be a future where politicians focused together on issues of the common good.
And, let’s be honest, we have seen glimpses of that over the past 20 years. We have also had relative peace. But we have also found ourselves kept apart by all the usual sectarian instincts, which have proven to be more deep–rooted than we ever imagined. So, we inhabit a province where people are more geographically divided than ever, where all politics easily becomes a zero– sum game, and where so many of our young people are simply glad to leave.
In the story of the disciples meeting Jesus on the Emmaus Road, on the evening of the first Easter Day, the disciples say, ‘We had hoped…’. That is one of the most human phrases in the Bible. In their case, their Messiah had been crucified and all they had lived for appeared lost. Their dreams were shattered, and the vision for the future was very blurred and uncertain.
But the truth was that the risen Christ was standing right beside them, and they just didn’t recognise it. This Easter, he stands alongside us in our mixed up lives and places. He hasn’t deserted us, no matter how hopeless the situation might seem to be. I wonder can we dare to allow him to have his way, and make his presence known?
+HaroldDown & Dromore