All Saints Church – King’s Lynn

The evening television news revealed a story which is so shocking, I feel almost ashamed to reproduce it here. 

Apparently, a ‘serving British soldier’ was jailed today, for three years, for urinating on a disabled woman, who lay dying in the street.

In the fifty years, or so, of my life, I would like to say that this would never have happened in the past.  That would be a lie – the lack of respect shown to the Irish, black people and ethnic minorities, particularly in the sixties and seventies, and the practice of ’queer(gay)-bashing’  – all are equally as disturbing as the event reported in todays media.  A basic lack of respect for the individual – a lack of respect for our ‘humanity’.

We are in ‘striking distance’ of All Saints’ Day, which celebrates the lives of those who gave clear examples of the way in which humanity is honoured and respected.  A day which exalts all that is good and honourable.  A holy day which is undergirded by the message of the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ – which sanctifies and honours all human nature, both in its’ frailty and in its’ strength. 

Sadly, all too often, human beings align themselves with acheivement and might – weakness and humility appear to have little or nothing to offer.  The Solemnity of All Saints reminds us – not of greatness or holiness – but of the grace which God gives to the weak and ordinary, the humble and the vulnerable, and of the way in which they respond to the ‘Jesus’ who is ‘incarnated’ before them, in human nature.

What did Jesus say?  “In as much as you did it to one of these, the least of my brethren, you did it to me … ”. Perhaps one of the prison Chaplains might help the ‘young soldier’ to understand the meaning of the words’.