As I write this I‘m looking at a picture of a group of about 40 people carrying St George’s crosses and Union Jacks at an anti-immigration protest in Dartford. Fixed to a railing is a large banner proclaiming ‘Jesus Saves’. Accompanying the 150,000 crowd at the Unite The Kingdom rally in September (at which a small group from St Martin’s, Westminster Quakers and Bloomsbury Baptists in the counter demonstration was attacked) were wooden crosses, public recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and a speech calling for a ban on any expression of non-Christian religion in the UK.
In 1944 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison his famous question ‘Who really is Jesus Christ for us today?’
Who is ‘us’?
Former Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby, writes: ‘The question of “us” is the issue of the boundaries of our solidarity, the territory beyond which all we see is “just a bunch of strangers”! Christ refuses to accommodate to any definition of “us” that we might choose – the identity of any “us” should be the one that appears in the light of Him alone.’
Bishop Rosemarie Mallett wrote recently that ‘we must reject any narrative that says the cross is a symbol of exclusion’ and in the same statement Rowan Williams adds ‘it is more than time to challenge the story that every migrant approaching our shores is unintelligible, with hostile values.’
Are we prepared for the challenge that only Christ should decide the answer to Bonhoeffer’s question about the boundaries of our solidarity? Peter Selby points out that knowing who ‘us’ is and knowing Christ are interdependent: ‘When we know Him, we know who ‘us’ is and, without submitting our decisions about who ‘us’ is to Him, we shall not know who He is.’
May we have the courage to resist a narrowing of the boundaries of ‘us’.
Jim Sikorski
