A letter arrived on Sunday afternoon, posted through the letterbox when I was out.  It wasn’t a bill or an invitation to dinner.  It was a rather hurtful critique of me, as a priest, which completely took me by surprise.  I suppose no-one likes to be criticised and especially not by a friend. 

The problem with ‘paper complaints’ is that they fail to express the tone of delivery.  The reader is always left wondering and, probably, tends to read more into what is ‘said’, without any comfort of any correction being available.   It was a very sad receipt of someone’s unhappiness and upset. 

After twenty years in ministry, in my experience,  people seem to spend more time being upset than being happy.  Why are we determined to be upset – because someone has offended or insulted us; impugned our integrity; deceived and lied to us; failed to acknowledge our generosity or just simply ignored us ?  The Gospels are full of stories about people who feel ‘hard done to’ and ‘left out’, spurned and wronged.  

The truth is, we cannot be denigrated or abused, through the actions of others, unless we choose to be so!  If we are offended or upset, it is because we think we deserve better and, quite frankly, that flies in the face of Gospel teaching.   Jesus tells us that if we are struck on one cheek by someone, which could be seen as a physical or verbal action, we should not retaliate, but  ‘turn the other cheek’, turning our face not once, but repeatedly until,  in effect, we take their anger away.    

Jesus always stood against those who maintained their right to respect and, of whom he was highly critical, as his arguments with the Pharisees clearly show.  He condemns their precise, ‘unflawed behaviour’, as they see it, particularly in their readiness to take offence at what he preached. Their failure was that they were too concerned about who they were, an ‘activity’ which consumed them so much that they failed to understand who he was. 

In 1989, the American photographer, Andres Serrano was paid for, and exhibited an extremely controversial work.  His subject was a plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of his own urine, controversially known as Piss Christ.  Whilst it is hardly a tasteful subject, the significance of what he was attempting to portray was misunderstood by many, and condemned by many Christians as blasphemous.  However, it was understood by one person, the Religious and art critic, Sister Mary Beckett, who said that it was not blasphemous but  a statement of ‘what we have done to Christ’.   In essence, it took the incisive and spiritual mind of a humble religious sister, dispossessed of worldly things, to see the truth. 

Far from being blasphemous, it is an irrevocable statement of how sometimes we fail to surrender our sense of importance and our dignity, and all that we feel is due to us,  in exchange for the deeply beautiful moving expression of Christ’s sacrifice as the profoundest expression of love, honour and respect in our lives as Christians towards others.  For all that may happen to us, it is nothing in comparison to what happened to Him, who gave His love and His life in exchange for His dignity and self-respect.