Caritas Sri Lanka - SEDEC

In the foregoing two meditations, we took note of the wounded and displaced persons in our country as a given social phenomenon and reflected over our response to God who challenges us through them. Our premise seemed to be that we see ourselves as those called upon to respond to a crisis created by others. This, however, is not a complete picture. What we often fail to do in such kind of meditative reflections is to examine whether we are part of the problem and how we contribute to the emergence of a wounded and displaced Christ. Our meditation is incomplete and even counter-productive if we do not address this unpleasant question.

David was a righteous king but had his weak moments! He wounded his own best friend and dislodged him from his legitimate position in life and from life itself. He was culpably unaware of his crime. As the King he would have punished anyone else who had perpetrated such a felony; and that is what he unwittingly confessed to Prophet Nathan. But shock and shame overpowered him when Nathan bluntly told him that he was such a criminal! He immediately acknowledged his guilt and turned back to God. We need the humility of David to recognize our role in wounding and displacing our own people.

A little more than two decades ago, there was in our country another reign of terror that wounded and displaced thousands of youth, as the IPKF was fighting the Tamils in the North and the SLA was cracking down on the Sinhala youth in the South. A Catholic priest genuinely attempted to go beyond the temporary task of healing wounds and welcoming the displaced. He worked towards healing the society which was wounding and displacing the innocent. He did not realize he was courting the fate of the Cross as his Master did. Whoever wishes to confront those who wound and displace people runs the risk of being wounded and displaced. He was hunted down by the powers that be and betrayed by a colleague who denounced him from the pulpit as a member of a terrorist group. The result was that our socially concerned priest's brothers were shot dead through mistaken identity and the priest himself became a refugee , wounded in his soul and seeking safety in unfamiliar environments. The clerical church's identification with, or connivance at, an oppressive regime is a cowardly act of participating in that regime's tyrannical program of wounding and displacing the innocent.

While not denying the Christian value of caring for the wounded and displaced persons, there is another option that we cannot fail to take as a Jesus community, the option that the aforementioned priest took. Once again, it is Jesus who has set us the example. According to him, healing the wounds and integrating the ostracized (i.e., replacing the displaced) are necessary merely as “signs” of God's Reign, and are not God's Reign itself. People took the signs to be the reality that these signs pointed to. They wanted to make him King and allow him to complete his social service while they would enjoy the results and applaud him from the sides.

The wounded and the displaced were not ready to participate in his mission. They did not understand that the short-term solution they desired would only encourage rather than check those who wound and displace others, as there is someone to take care of their victims. Jesus was disappointed with this reaction, and withdrew for a while from the crowd. This is known as his “Galilean crisis”, from which, however, he returned with a new message: the Reality he pointed to by his social involvement (“signs” ) required a more radical strategy which might end up with a head-on clash with the powers that be, a social conflict symbolized by the Cross. Whoever wants to join him must be ready for such an eventuality.

From that moment, most of his friends and followers deserted him. Only a few women walked with him till the end. To achieve that supreme goal, Jesus exposed himself to be wounded and eliminated. That was the “Sign of Jonah” which he flung in the face of what he called an “adulterous nation”, i.e., a nation that wounds and displaces the innocent. A church that fails to stand with Jesus before an adulterous nation through fear of losing privileges and powers will continue to wound and displace the innocent.