A Similtude of Betrayal

Two thousand years ago, the Jewish chief priests gathered in council, with Caiaphas - the high priest that year - afraid of the influence Jesus was having upon the Jewish faithful, fearing they would all come to believe in Him. Growing belief in Jesus was placing the very existence of the Jewish nation in jeopardy.

Caiaphas proclaimed; "...it is better that one man should die for the people, than for the whole nation to be destroyed." It was from that day, that they planned His death.
(John 11:45-53)

This was the most regrettable decision by Jewish hierarchy in the whole history of Judaism. This happened just over 2000 years ago because they failed to recognise the expected Messiah was indeed, Jesus.

Now, what is it that we have come to witness in our own time?
From time to time I heard it said, that the hierarchy of Christ's own Church, had been, for years, re-locating paedophile priests, moving them on into other unsuspecting parishes in order to avoid public scandal. Hierarchy responsible for this practice, thereby took upon themselves culpable complicity in every subsequent heinous violation of innocents in the parishes to which these predatorial wolves-in-sheep's-clothing were sent. Their practice effectively protected the predators from exposure and enabled them to continue offending without fear of sanction or public reckoning. Some victims were driven to suicide.

Their collective abandonment of the innocents to the wiles of predatory priests is certainly the most regrettable, collective decision exercised by Church hierarchy in modern times.

While endeavouring to save "the whole Church 'nation'" from public disgrace, their ill-conceived, expedient means to this end, spelt sacrifice of the well-being, and in some cases, cost the very lives of their innocent victims - living images of the innocent Christ. They have shamed the Church and generated an agony throughout its body - a searing lash, as were the lashes delivered upon Christ during His agonising passion. The Church will carry the scar of it till the end.

So, it is clear. Both Jewish and Christian hierarchy, in their own ways, in their own times, have sacrificed and crucified the suffering, innocent Christ to achieve an expedient end.

So, ends the 'similitude'. (Jews and Christians alike, carry the same awful scar.)
"Whatsoever you do, even to the least of My brethren, you do to Me." (Matthew 25:40.45)
"O my God, how is it possible that we have so abandoned Thee?"

Personally, I cannot come to terms with how hierarchical clergy, supposedly, apparently, could not realise their own complicity in the crimes they have facilitated, by their decisions not to take appropriate decisive preventative action against offending wolf-clergy, when it was so clearly their duty to do so. How could a person NOT realise the patent evil of the practice they employed?

The similitude of the Jewish sacrificing of the innocent Christ, and the Church's own sacrificing of its own innocent children, struck me at 8.30pm on Easter Sunday night, 2014. A sinner, I couldn't find a stone to throw - only a similitude!

God have mercy on us all, especially the children.

And, as for the guilty:
May they find reconciliation with You, O Lord, for if the charge remains with them, who could stand it?