A Ransom To Reckon With

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

David Mansfield has an excellent article on sydneyanglicans.net titled, ‘A ransom to reckon with’.

No Australian with a pulse could have been anything but deeply moved by the story of Australian doctor Ken Elliott and his wife Jocelyn, who were kidnapped in Burkina Faso by al-Qaeda-linked jihadists.

While Jocelyn was released after three weeks, Ken was held captive for seven years, enduring the most frightening conditions that would have sorely tested the health and resilience of any human being half or even a third of his age. He was 82 when he was captured and 88 when he was released.

Ken and Jocelyn were Christian missionaries and founded a bush hospital in 1972 in the town of Djibo. Ken, the only surgeon at the hospital, operated on many thousands of patients, charging them little or nothing.

Then, in January 2016, Ken and Jocelyn were kidnapped. Ken experienced the worst of human deprivation and unbelievably horrific conditions in his incarceration. He said that he has only seen one case of scurvy throughout his medical career and that was himself.

He suffered from dehydration, scorpions, sandstorms and the list goes on.

An ABC article described it this way: Imagine this: you are 82 years old, you were kidnapped by fanatical jihadists months ago, and you are somewhere in the Sahara Desert. You have one companion, a Romanian fellow hostage, 40 years younger than you. You have nothing to read, nothing to listen to, and your guards won't speak to you. They won't let you leave your makeshift shelter for fear you'll be spotted by French or American surveillance drones. It is ferociously hot in the daytime, and bitterly cold at night. You have one blanket. You dig into the sand to try to make your bed more comfortable and you get bitten on the hand by a scorpion. The pain is acute. It gets worse and worse. It travels up your arm to your shoulder. You have no painkillers, no treatment of any kind, so you wait for the pain to fade. Eventually, after two days and nights, it goes. Now, imagine that day follows identical day, and night follows identical night, for seven more years. And that you get bitten by scorpions 20 more times – on one occasion, the pain travels up to your right shoulder, across to the other, and down to your left hand.

In one of his few public appearances since his release in 2023, Ken was recently asked at a conference how God sustained him during his seven years of captivity. The soft-spoken surgeon plainly responded, “Very well”.

He said he recited memorised parts of Scripture because he was not permitted a Bible in captivity. “These were a great help, because I was able to meditate on these and pray for myself and for my captors.”

People throughout the world have been amazed, not only at the survival of the Elliotts, but how they have responded to the ordeal with such humility and grace.

Very little was said about whether a ransom was demanded for Ken’s release, although he and Jocelyn made it very clear that if a ransom was demanded, Ken’s instructions were clear: “Absolutely not”.

When Ken was finally released the Australian Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, said that no ransom was paid.

The most high-profile case of kidnapping for ransom on Australian soil was that of Graeme Thorne, an eight-yearold Australian boy, kidnapped and murdered in 1960. He was a year younger than me. A month before the kidnapping his parents, Bazil and Freda Thorne, who lived in a modest rented flat in the Sydney beachside suburb of Bondi, had won £100,000 in the newly conceived Opera House Lottery – designed to raise money for the construction of that iconic building. This was a considerable amount of money in 1960, when it was also customary to publish the names and addresses of lottery winners in the newspapers. The crime is still regarded as one of the most infamous in Australia's history because it was the country's first well-known abduction involving a young child for ransom – almost unthinkable during an era in Australia when people didn't bother to lock their doors at night before going to bed. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

Curious, then, that Jesus would use the metaphor of a “ransom” in describing his reason for dying. But with good reason. We are captive to sin and no ransom can liberate us. No amount of money can buy our freedom. No amount of trying to please God by religious observance or moral effort can pay the penalty that sin deserves. But Jesus is our ransom. His death on our behalf is the price he paid to secure our forgiveness, freedom and restored relationship with our Creator.

​Now, that’s a ransom to reckon with.

In Christ’s Love,

Craig Olliffe, Senior minister