LITMIR.BIZ

      Foreword

      RIGHT REVEREND DR ELEANOR SANDERSON

      Assistant Bishop of Wellington, New Zealand

The crucifixion of Jesus is confrontational. According to Jürgen Moltmann it is impossible to speak of Christian eschatological hope without being in conversation with the cross and all that the cross offends in our sensibilities.1 Yet, as this body of work contends, there have been pejorative limits to the confrontation of the cross and recognizing Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse has often felt beyond those limits. Having this important conversation, which recognizes the extent of violence and abuse that Jesus endured, requires us to have a deep level of vulnerability, rawness and honesty. This is because it is an active and real conversation about historic and contemporary divine and human suffering.

As an Anglican priest, I have guided Christian communities through the passion narratives of Holy Week over many years. Now, as a bishop, my identity and my life are connected to the cross in new ways. When I sign my name, I first mark the paper with the sign of the cross, the traditional signature of a bishop. I am called to be a bearer of blessing among my communities, using the outstretched arm of my own body to make the sign of the cross over our people. In all these bodily actions I must choose to walk with Jesus to the cross and beyond the cross. In my and Jesus’ walking together, in our spiritual intimacy, in the physicality of all mystical encounter, there is always a holding of each other’s trauma and the choice to be ministers of reconciliation in this world in which trauma abounds. Journeying with people who have experienced, or perpetrated, sexual trauma has been a consistent part of my life as a minister in the Church and I welcome a fresh sensibility of the way that Jesus’ own earthly experiences speak into a world so deeply affected by sexualized trauma.2 Even though, in doing so, we expose ourselves and each other to the pain of trying to have this conversation well: a call to speak reverently and responsibly.

      Suffering, albeit in diversity, has been a global experience characterizing our current epoch. A global pandemic, interspersed with present-day violence and, sometimes, painful protest to highlight historic and enduring violence and injustice, has shaped our global consciousness. These experiences intertwine the local/embodied specific and the global cultivation of our shared humanity. The paschal mystery is potent and important for both this cultivation of our human society and for our deeply personal experiences of being human. Journeying with Jesus’ passion and trauma in New Zealand in Holy Week in 2019 required exceptional reverence and responsibility. The horrific and violent deaths of 52 men, women and children while at prayer in mosques in Christchurch on 15 March were very present in our country’s consciousness at Eastertide. The Royal Commission into historic abuse in state care and institutions, including the Church, also began in 2019 in Aotearoa New Zealand. The phrase, ‘you should have been safe here’, first spoken by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in response to the mosque attacks, became a strong lament in our society. It was a phrase that confronted me as I came to write to our diocese in our Bishops’ Easter message in 2019, when the violence of the mosque attacks was so recent:

      You should have been safe here

      Those haunting words which have been spoken out over our nation in these recent weeks keep resounding in my heart. As I have moved between our churches, week by week, and as we have gathered day by day in the deep tradition of our Holy Week, my mind has become stuck on that phrase. You should have been safe here. The grief of my heart for our world at this time is ripe, as is my grief for the people about whom those words were rightly spoken. Yet I find myself repeating them under my breath to someone else: to Christ. To my friend Jesus those words also seem so painfully real. You should have been safe here. You came to that which was your own, but your own didn’t recognise you. All things came into being through you and what came into being was light and life (as proclaimed in the beginning of John’s Gospel). You, friend, bringing your light and life, should have been safe here. But you weren’t … You gave life to people. You loved people. You who are one with the God who is love. You who are one with the source of life. Yet, in response to your gift of love and life to this world, you were given death. You were given hate.

      You knew all those things, and in the agony of your heart you still accepted that, and so you said, ‘this is my body given for you’.

      One physical body was destroyed by fear, by hate, by human power. Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains but a seed, but if it dies it produces many seeds (John 12.24). Our lips now confess that we are the body of Christ, we are those many seeds. That you are with us. That we get to proclaim that you are here, that you are risen, that in you nothing can separate us from the love and life of God.

      Asking us to have a conversation about Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse and inviting us to have a conversation with Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse can have powerful consequences. These consequences can be deeply personal, institutionally transformative and also profoundly significant for societies and cultures that have been so influenced by interpreting the historical life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

      I am therefore thankful for the courage of those initiating these conversations. I am also thankful for the Christian theological posture of hope. I therefore offer into the beginning of these conversations two things: the first, words spoken between some of the earliest followers of Jesus, from the Letter to the Hebrews 12.1–3; the second, a poem written many years ago, which was my personal response to Christ’s solidarity with those who experience sexual violation.

      Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart.

       Love is vulnerability

       Strength didn’t come in the shape

       I painted and pursued,

       but in the form of a humiliated man

       stretched out to die

       upon a splintered tree,

       Whose tears of love;

       pure vulnerability,

       flow endlessly and endlessly.

       In his outstretched, bruised

       and beaten embrace,

       that dusty cheek

       against my face

       is freedom.

       Freedom that no pain or shame

       needs to be explained or named

       to this friend who shaped them not,

       but wore them as his only clothes

       then shook them off

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