Diocese of Liverpool

Thought for the Day, 20 August 2003

The Rt Rev. James Jones

People are being killed everyday. Soldiers, Civilians. Children and Babies. The innocent, the guilty. In Jerusalem and Baghdad. The blowing up of the UN building, burying in the rubble both the living and the dead, destroys the dream that doing good in this life will always be recognised and rewarded.

Those who supported the United Nations will feel outraged. ‘Don't the assassins know that these are their friends, the ones who pleaded time for Iraq to prove its compliance with their resolutions.'

Those, who felt the UN was overly-generous in their patience with the tyrannical regime, will feel that they have now been baptised in the cruel realities of this country.

It has become a feature of modern conflicts that nobody is immune from hostilities, nobody safe in the zone of war. Aid workers and journalists are regularly numbered among the dead. To date in Iraq 19 journalists have been killed . And now 17 United Nations workers, including the Head f Mission, lie dead, and their blood oils the soil of the land they came to save.

This is the poignancy of the deed. These were people risking their lives to do good.

Somehow we feel everybody should know this, respect it. It's as if there's some subconscious awareness that somewhere in the universe there's a law which says that those who do good, selflessly, should be honoured and protected. Even on a personal level we feel it. We all know what it's like to go out of our way to help someone or do something noble – only to find that things then go badly wrong for us.

Friends, like Job's comforters, will say you were a mug to have done it. In your heart of hearts you'll feel that, if there were any justice in the world, you should have been rewarded, not punished for this act of kindness.

And, if God has featured in your thinking, you'll be angry at his seemingly capricious indifference to the sacrifice you've made. Except. Except! The revelation that Jesus made is that God is fully acquainted with sacrifice and suffering. A man of sorrows himself, Jesus came to do good, and in this life found only grief in return.

But how do we make sense of that internal moral sense that this atrocity should not have happened. Is it an illusion? Are we deceiving ourselves to believe in this life that good should be rewarded and evil punished, when so often they manifestly aren't! This moral intuition is, I believe, not an illusion.

I hear it calling out for a greater canvass, for a landscape larger than the stage of this world. For, it is before God alone that good and evil are exposed for what they are and meet their true and just reward.

This is where, I believe, our moral sense is ultimately vindicated, and the sacrifice in Baghdad finally honoured.