Articles - From the Vicar

January 2000

Since I have a mild aversion both to clichés and to pedants, I do not intend to use this space either to proclaim an exquisitely fashioned Millennium Message or to bemoan the universal year-early celebrations of the new millennium. In any case, the turning of another year (however numerically significant) is unlikely to be of great interest to child labourers in the Indian sub-continent, to street children in Brazil or to those maimed by land mines in Angola all of whom are left, like so many others, at the back of the never-ending race for economic growth.

Medieval churches had no seating. Around the walls of the church a stone ledge could often be found, a concession to those who did not have the strength to stand for the whole of the elaborate liturgy of the time (hence the expression about the weak going to the wall). That stone ledge, it seems to me, is a metaphor for the way in which the wealthy industrialised countries treat the rest of the world's nations: we offer paltry amounts of aid and (belatedly) limited debt relief to allow them to stagger on for a few more months; yet we ensure that those same nations are kept at the margins of economic prosperity through our continuing support of an economic order that is unlikely ever to allow them to come in from the edge.

The Jubilee 2000 coalition has been working for the past few years to ensure that the voices of privilege are not the only ones to be heard in the world economic debate. The work of Jubilee 2000 will come into sharp focus this year. It is work that every Christian should support because, in doing so, we are identifying ourselves with the first public act of Jesus' ministry, as recounted in Luke's Gospel, when our Lord read from the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue at Nazareth: " 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.' Then Jesus sat down and began by saying to them 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,' " May the year 2000, through our Christian work and witness, be a year of God's favour to all those who still sit on the world's margins.