Torture and Eucharist

I can hardly hear good news from my country Indonesia. I've come to a point where I feel numb upon hearing horrible news like a violent attack on an Islamic sect on Feb 6, 2011, followed by church burning in Temanggung, Central Java. (Btw, it's curious that Al-Jazeera doesn't report the second incident at all.) It's not my intention to try to find out or discuss whom to blame for these horrendous incident. If there is anything that I can think of (as I said earlier, I feel numb...), it is to realize the very presence of torture within Indonesian society. Even though Indonesians do not live under an autocratic regime, torture is still very much REAL. It is something which Singaporeans (I'm using Singaporeans as an example simply because I currently live in Singapore) will probably never understand. I recall how a Singaporean teen, whom I led in a Bibly study, had a difficult time to understand the word "persecution" when we tried to study biblical passages which talked about being persecuted for Christ. To him, "persecution" is merely a word without any correspondences whatsoever to any reality outside the word itself. He can't relate to it at all. So, it becomes meaningless.

Reading all these horrendous news reminds me of the torture which Christ chose to undergo. By willingly undergoing such an atrocious torture, he overturned the logic of torture. Torture caused Christ to suffer. But Christ's suffering brings life to all who believe in him and are willing to suffer and die for him and therefore live in him. This is celebrated in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is an antithesis of torture. As William Cavanaugh, theologizing from within the context of the Pinochet regime in Chile, has eloquently put it,

Torture creates fearful and isolated bodies, bodies docile to the purpose of regime; the Eucharist effects the body of Christ, a body marked by resistance to worldly power. Torture creates victims; Eucharist creates witnesses, martyrs. Isolation is overcome in the Eucharist by the building of a communal body which resists the state’s attempt to disappear it.