Tag: makes

According to convention, this is a Good Friday. It is also a Holy Friday. And convention is what human beings create and stick to. It is our tradition of doing things and naming events. There is a paradox here.

From the perspective of the God who ordained the birth and death of Jesus the Christ, whatever He does is good, and that includes the sacrifice of a son. But for us as humans, we tend to see things differently. We would not be humans if we don’t. So, we consider death in whatever form or shape as bad.

In the particular case of the death of Christ on the cross, it is not only the manner of the death but the intrigue that caused it that was extremely bad and evil. He was wrongly accused of treason and blasphemy. He was maltreated by his accusers. He was mocked. There was a palpable miscarriage of justice. In the midst of it all, he was calm and cool. In that regard, the day on which his unjust killing occurred must be judged a bad day for all intents and purposes—that is, from our human point of view. If it happened to any of us, and we were in a position to pass judgment, we would curse the day it occurred. Therefore, if by convention we have come to recognise the day on which the messiah was crucified as good, there better be a good explanation and justification.

There is an explanation and, humanly speaking, it is a selfish one. For Christians, the death on the cross is even a happier and merrier occurrence than the birth in the manger because without it, salvation is impossible. Therefore, for the salvation of humans, Christ must die on the cross and resurrect from the grave. The assumed consequence of death on the cross—the salvation of humans—is good. Therefore the means to that consequence is good. Even the elders who prosecuted and judged Christ made the point that it is alright that one should die so that the many may be saved.It is a utilitarian reasoning.

Let us assume that this is a valid reasoning and there is something good in the death on the cross and therefore this is indeed a Good Friday. Shouldn’t we also expect at least believers in the sacrifice that made possible the salvation of souls follow suit? Shouldn’t the example be a model for leaders and followers at least in Christendom? His was a life of simplicity. His armour was truthfulness. He delivered a message of hope and redemption. He not only empathised with the poor, he also blessed them with sustenance. And while he abhorred sin, he did not reject sinners; he dined with them.

Two thousand years after the supreme sacrifice of the one we claim to follow, many Christians, including those in the leadership rank of all stripes and collars have only paid lip service to the creed of the messiah. They complicate what is a simple message of love and sacrifice. They are pretenders and impostors who draw crowds of sycophants through means other than Christ. They court satanic powers to attract membership to their congregation and expect the spirit of Christ to fall on them! They sell their halls of worship to the highest bidder and hope that the God who noticed and recognised the widow and her mite is not attentive. And while they condemn corruption from the pulpit, they are not ashamed to receive the bounties that corrupted hands deliver.

No one preaches or expects perfection. Even the messiah who reflected the perfection of God was humble enough to attribute perfection to God alone. But there is an expectation that spiritual leaders have the responsibility to lead by example and not just by words, in the observance of the teachings of Christ. Instead, in many congregations, the human inclination to division by rank and the promotion of inequality instead of the egalitarian teaching of Christ has been the order. We identify spiritual kinds with some higher than others and the concept of the priesthood of all believers is jettisoned. Christ taught his disciples that he was their only Teacher and they shouldn’t call anyone on earth teacher. He told them that their only Father was in heaven and they shouldn’t call anyone on earth Father. He taught them that whoever was greatest among them shall be their servant. And he demonstrated this by washing their feet.

Christ lived a simple human life but was not a proud and haughty human. He dined with sinners; he drank wine; he associated with an adulterer without condoning adultery, and he revered the Sabbath day without worshipping it, which was one of the reasons he was rejected by the Pharisees.

On our part, we have substituted for Christ’s teachings the Big-man philosophy of religion. In this philosophy, what really matters is how big the followership is, and how much power and resources we are able thereby to control. No wonder that even as churches litter the nooks and crannies of our streets, the evils of cultism, kidnapping, and armed robbery are on the rise. Sure, we condemn the evils that eat at the soul of the individual perpetrators without harming others, but we condone those evils that harm others but benefit the perpetrator.

On this remembrance of an otherwise bad day which by convention we have come to regard as good because we believe that it was the moment our salvation was bought with the blood of the innocent, it behooves all Christians to truly imbibe the teachings of Christ and the lessons of the cross. If we truly believe that He sacrificed his life so we can gain salvation, it is our obligation to make humanly possible sacrifices so the downtrodden, the rejected and forgotten in our midst may live a live that is dignified and decent. It is not the magnificence of a cathedral that matters; it is the spirit of giving that we imbibe in the hearts of men and women that God appreciates.

If the foregoing sounds like a sermon; it isn’t. It is only a sober thought and reflection on our spiritual heritage in the age of ostentatious spirituality, an oxymoron in itself.