Miki Cross

Today’s feast of the Japanese Jesuit martyr, Paul Miki, and his 25 co-crucified martyrs who were laymen helped me reflect even more deeply on the question my 9 year daughter *randomly* asked yesterday at breakfast: ‘Daddy, what does it mean that Jesus had to die for our sins?’

The toughest theological challenges I face always and without exception come from children.  Not just because they ask such bottom-line questions, but because they don’t allow sophisticates to dazzle them with a profusion of heady words and complex arguments.  In response to such attempts, one of my sons, at the age of six, simply said to me, ‘Too much, Dad;’ or my daughter recently quipped back as I tried to explain transubstantiation, ‘Dad, can you speak American?’  Gotta be simple, clear, to the point.

So, after a slight panic at the blank I was drawing, I speedily fumbled a few questions back to her to stall for time – ‘Why do you think God sent his Son into the world? Well, what is sin? Why do you think we killed him? How did he act on the cross? What did he say after he rose again?’ Well, her answers were so good, so pithy, that I was able, even before the coffee had awakened my higher thinking powers, to piece together an argument something like this: ‘So, it sounds like we said *no* to heaven, but that Jesus came down from his Father in heaven because he loved us; and he died because people didn’t love God; and that he used the cross as a place to say how much he loved us, to show how much he loved us, how much we should love, and the cross was the hardest place to forgive us for hating him, not loving God and each other – so how amazing is that?; and then he rose on Easter to give us another chance to go back up to his home in heaven with him.’  I felt successful because I was able to use her answers to answer, and more successful that I learned from her answers a new and fresh way of looking at that very basic, but elusive question that all Christians should be able to answer on-the-spot to a child.

Then this this morning when I read the meditation on the feast day, I came across these ‘final’ words of St Paul Miki:

‘After Christ’s example, I forgive my persecutors. I do not hate them. I ask God to have pity on all, and I hope my blood will fall on my fellow men as a fruitful rain.’

Thanks to my daughter, those words have fresh impact. May it be so for all of us today as we face the daily crosses that are the kindling wood of our call to be fiery saints.