After Jesus died, his followers
struggled to make theological sense out of his death. Out of their
pain and grief, they reread the Hebrew Scriptures in light of
the way they had experienced God in the community Jesus formed
around himself during his ministry. The writer of Luke’s
Gospel represents this process in the encounter of the two disciples
with the resurrected Christ on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24: 13-27).
Jesus led these disheartened disciples in the reinterpretation
of Moses and the prophets.
This process of reinterpretation continues today, as women and
men seek to make sense out of their experiences and their lives
in light of the Scriptures. CEDEPCA and the Latin American Biblical
University are committed to preparing people for active participation
in the interpretive community, the church.
The students have found that we cannot talk about the death of
one man 2,000 years ago without talking about the unnecessary
deaths happening around us today. Slowly, the stories are coming
out.
One woman shared how her father was imprisoned in 1954 after
the CIA-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected
government of Jacobo Arbenz. In prison, he met many campesinos,
peasants who didn’t even know how to read. They were accused
of being communists because they backed the agrarian reform the
Arbenz government had promoted. Sonia’s father was eventually
released. Many others were not. No one knows how many were executed
in the months following the coup that began the military’s
rule.
Another woman’s mother was killed in a massacre carried
out by the army on a farm in the Peten in 1981. The army used
massacres to eliminate those sectors of the civilian population
they thought might support the guerrillas fighting for revolutionary
change. In this case, however, the massacre seems to have been
the result of a rivalry between two factions of the army. Elvira’s
mother is one of the more than 200,000 Guatemalans murdered during
the thirty-six years of armed conflict.
The younger members of the class, those who have come of age
in the decade since the peace accords were signed, listen respectfully.
They ask why they had to come to CEDEPCA and take a class from
a foreign professor to learn about this history of their own country.
Why weren’t they taught these things in school? But they
have more immediate concerns. In their barrios they watch as their
peers are lured into gangs, where violence and death become a
way of life for those who feel they have no other options. What
do the churches have to offer to these young people? What can
salvation mean to those who are threatened with death if they
try to leave the gang?
My role in this process is not to provide the answers, but to
encourage the students to ask difficult questions of God, of the
Scriptures, and of their churches. I share with them how Christian
communities in other times and places have answered these questions.
CEDEPCA and the Latin American Biblical University are committed
to providing people with tools for doing theological reflection
out of the needs within their own contexts.
Ultimately, each one of the students, and each one of us as followers
of Christ, must decide what message of salvation we will seek
to live out. In this Eastertide, may the Spirit of the One who
raised Jesus from the dead, guide each of us into new life.
Blessings,
Karla
For all of us
The 2006 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p.
64
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