Passion, Persecution, Prayer: A Good Friday Reflection
By Grant McClung
I’m on my way again through Richard Foster’s classic Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth (Harper San Francisco 1998) and am arrested by his meditation focus on the Passion of Jesus Christ. Foster proposes that believers:
“…meditate upon the events of our time and seek to perceive their significance. We have a spiritual obligation to penetrate the inner meaning of events, not to gain power but to gain prophetic perspective. Thomas Merton writes that the person, ‘…who has mediated on the Passion of Christ but has not meditated on the extermination camps of Dachau and Auschwitz has not yet fully entered into the experience of Christianity in our time'” (p. 32).
And what is the “experience of Christianity in our time?” Revival, unprecedented growth, growing social and political influence? Yes, for sure. However, the daily experience of millions on this day of remembrance is persecution and suffering (See www.persecutedchurch.org and www.persecution.org). So today we remember our friends, global members of the Christian family, in places like Sudan, Dafur, Tibet, North Korea, Turkey, and the list goes on and on.
The list can be shortened and abolished by our prayers, giving, and concentrated activism until the good news of Good Friday is embraced by all. “Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Hebrews 13.3)
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Grant McClung is a member of the Church of God International Executive Council.
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