THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS AT THE UNITED NATIONS
“The wound is the place where God breaks
through …
and may be the place of great creativity.”
Marian Woodman
THE MYSTERY OF THE CROSS AT THE UNITED NATIONS
“The wound is the place where God breaks
through …
and may be the place of great creativity.”
Marian Woodman
St. Paul reminds us the Cross is a stumbling block to those who do not understand. I’d wager you could spend a year at the United Nations and hear not a single mention of “the Cross”. On second thoughts, maybe a 100 years.
But actions speak louder … Jesus’ experience of the Cross is a resounding NO to all that stifles, crushes or snuffs out life. He put his life where his words are. In today’s phrase, Jesus ‘walked the talk’. I suggest that, at its best, what the United Nations tries to do is a faint echo of what lies at the heart of the Cross.
In 2000, the Nations of the World met in New York to plan a better Third Millennium for us all. United Nations member States have pledged, by 2015, to halve:
people surviving on less than a
dollar a day …
If you did it to one of the least you
did it to me!
people who suffer hunger …
Don’t send them away, feed them yourselves!
people with no access to safe drinking
water …
I thirst.
the mortality rate among children under
five …
Let the little children come.
halt and reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS
…
Of course I want to, be healed!
The Cross challenges us to put faces to the tragic stories. They are our sisters and brothers. In people’s struggles that find a voice at the United Nations, we hear an echo of Jesus wrestling with evil - hunger, poverty, filthy water, others’ greed, disease. NO! Not one of my dear sisters and brothers should live this way.Nothing genuinely human fails to find an echo in our hearts … Gaudium et Spes.
The Mystery of the Cross? Jesus takes on himself the evil of the world that we might all be free. Consciously or not, we are each invited, in our own time and place, to make real this declaration of freedom for today’s globalizing world.
"The Mystery of the Cross at the United Nations", Finding the Cross, The Passionists Compassion, Winter 2004, No. 75, p.19-20 by Father Kevin Dance, C.P., Passionists International, 777 UN Plaza #6H, New York, NY 10017 USA, Telephone (718) 739-5661 Fax (646) 227-1879 Email kdanceun@cpprov.org
May the Passion of Jesus be always in our hearts