At Last! Someone Speaks Truth To Power!

'O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' Finally CiF can no longer hide what we all know is self-evident truth.

As a child I was taught that silence was golden. On our way to assembly the teachers would make us press our fingers over our lips so only the sound of us padding to the hall could be heard. The local vicar stood at the front of the class every year at Lent to tell us that Jesus was silent in the face of his accusers. He would tell us that silence “can be more eloquent than a speech and louder than a shout”.

He would draw on the passage from St Matthew’s Gospel in which, after his betrayal and arrest in Gethsemane, Jesus is brought before Pilate, and refuses to answer his questions. I was confused by the silence of Jesus – why didn’t he speak out? Of course, various interpretations have read this silence as a way of wresting power back from Pilate. But as a child the message was clear to me: silence was strength; and in the face of adversity or abuse, it was dignified.

*blinks*

Ah. I might have known, really...