Good News For You: Freedom from a double debt
“Angela’s Ashes,” a popular movie and book, graphically describes Irish writer Frank McCourt’s childhood during the 1920s Great Depression.
It’s a story of resourcefulness and hope that overcomes a stifling scenario of grinding poverty; religious prejudice; inadequate housing; the deaths of three siblings; and a father who focuses on getting drunk, avoiding work, and producing extra mouths to feed…
Wanting to break free, he dreams of making a new start in America, but he is forced to support his family through any work he could find.
Basic schooling shows his aptitude for words, and he eventually gains work delivering telegrams. For younger readers, telegrams were brief emails - written down or phoned in for postal staff to deliver…
When a moneylender recognises his word skills and hires him to write her letters of demand, he resourcefully picks up extra cash - postage costs - by delivering the letters himself.
Freedom finally arrives, in a gruesome disguise. Finding the moneylender dead, he takes money from her cashbox to cover his fare to America. He also destroys her ledger book – which removes everyone’s debts and mirrors a cosmic event from almost nineteen centuries earlier.
For people with no political or religious clout, Jesus’ teaching and miracles brought new horizons and new access to God - but he had much more to offer…
Because of a moneylender’s death, McCourt instantly removes local debts, but Jesus uses his own death – agonizing and undeserved - to release people anywhere from emotional and spiritual debts forever.
These debts comprise a complex, painful legacy: of our bad choices; of how other people may have exploited us or betrayed our trust; or when unexpected disasters have caused life to spiral out of control. And this legacy is compounded if bitterness festers with self-pity, resentment, or revenge.
Jesus took this whole legacy on himself, offering us acceptance and forgiveness to replace its weight, for he came to defeat the power of fear and death with the renewing power of his love.
His love helps us to see new possibilities for ourselves and for others, to even find ways to help anyone who feels they have lived it up so much that they can’t live it down. Then they may learn to relax in his ability to bring out beauty from the worst setbacks.
All he asks of us is that we are willing to ask for his help…
Noel Mitaxa