Sunday, September 14, 2008 Lagura: The heart of the good news By Fr. Flor Lagura, SVD in the service of the word
REPORTS filtering in from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur have pictured thousands of suffering men, women and children. Many are diseased-stricken, many others are famished, and the whole mass of humanity is terrorized by the violence of the ongoing war, a conflict many in our world would prefer to ignore or even conveniently forget.
A group of bishops, however, in their humanitarian visit saw beyond the suffering people, a country that is fantastically beautiful. The prelates fell in love with the country and are doing all within their means to help its people. And they vowed to be with those long-suffering people in every way they can to express their oneness and concern.
In the gospel of John we find such solidarity and concern in their highest form expressed in these astounding words, “For God so loved the world that He gave it His only son.” This is the heart, the essence of the gospel. In short, it is the gospel within the gospel—the best news there ever is that should warm the hearts of those who hear it.
Taking a closer look at this incredibly beautiful yet all true news we note that it is God, the being whom mystics like Meister Eckart claim is the “totally other”(totaliter aliter). Even then, God deigns to go down to the level of the world which, with Sudan’s Darfur as an example, is fantastically beautiful but, at the same time wracked by the hatred of people who maim and kill each other. Our own Basilan and many parts of our country, beautiful as they are and peopled by men and women who are otherwise lovers of peace, are mute testimonies to the evil men do to each other.
Despite the pathetic situation due mostly to the evil that men do, God still loves the world He has created. It is no whim, there is nothing emotional about it. God loves the world intending the very best for it despite man’s folly to destroy it and each other in the process. To express His love, God gave to this world the very best there ever is: His only son who died transfixed to the hard wood of the cross as the sign of God’s love
Skeptics and outright enemies of the faith jeer the cross as the supreme sign of folly. Others point to the suffering and misery of people as proof against a God who is good and loving, all the while conveniently turning their eyes from the sight and closing their ears to the reports that such sufferings are many times, of man’s own making.
The wisdom of God’s love, however, is seen by men like St. John Vianney who proclaimed that “In the heart that loves God, it is always springtime.” Despite the horrors he experienced as a prisoner in a Nazi camp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his “Letters from Prison,” that the love of God and for God will in the end blot out all hatred and bitterness.
Darfur in Sudan and parts of our country which experienced so much unspeakable pain and uncalled for acts of violence must take consolation and pin their hope on the God who loves the world: all its men and women in all places and at all times. The cross where His son was impaled is the mute but resounding testimony of His great love.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” John 3:16-17
