Thought for the day.

The book that I'm reading has a fantastic paragraph that reads like this:

In our village our only Bible had allof its pages missing after the forty-sixth verse of the twenty-seventh chapter of Matthew, so that the end of our religion, as far as any of us knew, was My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me?  We understood this was the end of the story.

Just transcribing it brings tears to my eyes.  That a whole african village (fictional, of course) could believe that Christ, hanging on the cross in his most agonizing of moments, would think this was the end.  For them, there was no Easter morning, no Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus in the garden,  no resurrection, no acts of the apostles afterward. 

It just struck me how sad this (again, fictional) village's religion would have been.  They would have had all the miricles he performed, his words during the sermon on the mount, his agony in Gethsemane and his betrayal that led to his crucifixion, but none of the goodness afterwards.  It would have made their religion one of sadness, of being built up for something good by a person with real promise only to be let down in the end.  I guess life is like that, but we have hope for something better.  Those who know of the good news that happened afterward have been given the hope that this village was not.

Anyway, I don't get churchy very often, but I had underlined that passage in my book (Little Bee, by Chris Cleave) and I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I am grateful I know that good things happened after that heart-wrenching passage of scripture from Matthew.  I'm glad I have hope.