Sadness, and yet Hope against Hope …
It is hard to grasp the fullness of the tragedy that we have been watching in Kabul over these days. The final UK flight carrying purely civilian refugees has now departed, and the air-lift has finished. Hundreds of entitled passengers remain in Afghanistan, at great risk. Their immediate future must be uncertain, along with that of the many, many people who have made their way to the border in the hope of another exit route. The world watches, and our hearts go out to so many for whom we must now pray: to refugees who have got on a flight and have now to make their new life in a foreign country; to those who remain behind, fearful and in some cases terrified; to women, whose rights and status seem once again likely to be eclipsed by a fundamentalist and entirely undemocratic government; to the victims, wounded and killed and bereaved, of the terrible bomb attack; to the American soldiers who were killed on almost the last day of duty, and to their families who will have received the dreaded notification that night somewhere in the United States …
Is there hope? As Christians, we know that there is always hope. But there are hard lessons here. Our Gospel reading for this final Sunday of August gives St Mark’s account of another tough conversation between the Lord and the Pharisees. The Pharisees are given an unjustifiably bad press in the Gospels, which, through biblical study, takes a lot of de-coding, but it is interesting to note that their name means ‘separated ones’ or ‘separatists’, a name which they willingly seem to have accepted when it was first coined by their opponents, regarding their ‘separation’ from others as a sign of their distinctiveness before God. That is not without a risk of pride. The word ‘Taliban’ might be translated as ‘those who study’: a group set apart by their study of the law, by their credentials as followers of the true scholars, removed from the moral requirement of everyday law. And was there not also an arrogance in the West’s occupation of Afghanistan twenty years ago, thinking that we could convert a culture that we didn’t understand (as already proved at least twice by history) into the principles of liberal Western democracy?
I hope sincerely that Afghans who are seriously at risk from the Taliban will not be deserted, and that Western promises to them will be honoured. I hope that international pressure will call the Taliban to a more moderate form of rule than they have shown in the past, although that may be a task for the longer haul. And I hope most of all that we, the global community who have watched this terrible episode in human history, will learn again the lesson of humility and will be called to repentance.
Kyrie Eleison.
+ Peter
