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"The fire that consumes the holocaust on the altar
must not be allowed to go out.
Every morning the priest must make it up with wood"
Leviticus 6,5
The bulk of this third issue is my report on the NJPC of England and Wales whose theme was "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for Justice - "a theology of protest in a globalised world". We are to set on undying fire the world. Just to give you a hint, I report a passage from the intervention of the Benedictine Fr. Tom Cullinan. (In a private moment he confided me that the Comboni and the Jesuits are the outposts of the Church in matter concerning Justice and Peace.)
"The tendency we have when we fight God in the quite moments of our reflecting life about who is in our world; when the statistics turn into persons and you in your prayer life, reflecting, struggle with this big question of being in communion with the people in our world, against whom every thing is working. I think is a quite wrong understand of faith and of prayer not to come to a point to be furious and angry and despairing with God. If our weekend today is not a protest against God as well as the things we should be protesting about, then it is possible we have not keying into the Jewish - Christian God revealed to us supremely in Jesus Christ...
That anger in us is a vital part of our growth in faith and understanding because without anger, and anger addressed to God, then we do not get caught up into God’s own anger and God’s passion about his creation and people, and the story that is being unfolded in our beautiful and shocking planet. There comes a point in which God will say to us: "if you do not stand up and fight me you will never know me. Come on! Stand up and fight me, otherwise you will never know me". It may be like Jacob. We know from the beginning of the night struggle certainly who will be the victor in the end and almost certainly that we will come out wounded hobbling around out of the contest. But I plead with you do not domesticate God and do not reduce him to a nice God doing nice things to nice people...
When the four horsemen come out on into our world, our planet and there is plague and earthquake in Turkey and famine in Ethiopia and so on. That language given to us in the New Testament is meant to be utterly shocking because is demanding of us that we face this question: If God is God why do the innocent in such great numbers suffer? It may be not very encouraging to say that the final answer to that question awaits you at the other side of death. But it is crucially important we should engage in that contestation with God. People say that God having created us in his likeness and in his image, we spend the rest of our life in recreating his into ours.There is a great tendency in our liturgy, in our prayer, in our preaching to make God into a bourgeois benefactor or even a slightly anxious spectator. We all have to have pretty inadequate models of God to work with but for goodness sake do not stay with any model long enough to get caught by them. I invite you to hear the word of God in you saying: "Come on! Stand up and fight otherwise you will never know me!" .