Last Thursday I caught my train home from work as usual from Liverpool Street Station to Marks Tey. I usually sit in the front carriage so I am nearer to the exit when I get off at my home station. It’s a journey that takes around 50-55 minutes. As we were travelling through Romford Station there was an almighty bang! The train then came to a gradual halt. At first we thought the train had hit a bad bit of track.
We then sat and waited and waited and waited…
Eventually we heard a policeman’s voice come on the loudspeaker: “This is PC Smith. We regret to inform you that there has been a fatality at Romford station. Someone has thrown themselves in front of your train. We apologise for the delay to your journey, but we will be here for some time yet.”
My first reaction was, “Oh no, how awful!” But this was not shared by all my fellow commuters. This businessman next to me phoned up his wife to tell her how this selfish f***ing C*** had thrown himself in front of our train, the f***ing w***er. In fact, his tirade to his poor wife probably lasted the best of ten minutes. The finale of his message was to say he wouldn’t be home in time to put the kids to bed, and don’t bother cooking dinner.
All in all, we were stuck there for 2 hours and 20 minutes. I should have been at a church meeting that night, but my own phone call home was a little more low key and restrained!
I don’t know what made that person jump. Most people in my carriage thought that the person was totally selfish. One person remarked, “Why didn’t they just take pills and leave the rest of us out of it?”
This one unhappy person who nobody knew had now managed to affect the lives of hundreds of people on one Thursday night home. Someone who none of us had met was now resented, despised, even hated.
What had driven that person to jump? Perhaps, only God knows. No person feeling suicidal thinks how they are going to disrupt the evening routine of train commuters. It’s almost a given to say that you are not thinking your straightest when you are that desperate. I suspect that person cared little whether they were found dead with a clean hankie in their pocket.
In the gospel of St John we have the famous picture of the Good Shepherd. The shepherd would pride himself on knowing all his sheep. Here Jesus describes himself as one who is 100% committed to his flock. When under attack from bandits or wolves the hired hand will run away because he has no corporate responsibility or emotional ownership to the sheep business, while the shepherd would never dream for one moment of abandoning his sheep. He would rather die first.
In the midst of the corporate anger and frustration on Thursday night, I felt more than a little sadness within. It’s a startling truth that Jesus died for this train jumper before he chose to die himself on Thursday night. The real tragedy is if the person had known Jesus too, perhaps he wouldn’t have jumped. Who knows? I, for one, would have loved to have introduced him first to the Shepherd before he introduced himself to us on the 18.02.
ASD
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