With Burning Faith - Call for Christian Hope
With burning faith, our brethren in Christ, we are all affected by the vicissitudes of current affairs. Some of us are hesitating or apprehensive about immediate changes, and some of us cheering. But all of us should be reminded by the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection of Jesus, the sole core of our faith.
When we revisit the history of our great, ecumenical, and catholic church, it can be noted in the Theological Declaration of Barmen in 1934, our Church gave an unambiguous response: all alteration of the Bible, however political or worldly honoured, should be explicitly rejected. Our Church was surrounded by populist propaganda, the desire to put blame on minorities, the idolatry of authoritarian politics as we are today. In Mit brennender Sorge, Pius XI wrote in more particular form during 1937 – ‘Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honourable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinises them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds’.
Our brethren in Christ, we should recognise without any self-deception that idolatry, whether for strong leaders, ‘law and order’, or the exclusion of certain people, are not any part of Christian value; on the contrary, they stand for the exact things Jesus was sent to oppose.
When Jesus was begotten, He was rejected in His birthplace, Bethlehem, where he had nowhere to stay. ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His Head’ (Matt 8:20). This is a brilliant reminder for our readers who are at the comfort of their homes to think of the homeless, the people who stay in the camps, the people who are denied housing. As his birthplace became perilous, His family was seeking asylum in Egypt, deprived of home. ‘You shall not oppress a sojourner. You know the heart of a sojourner, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt’ (Exodus 23:9).
In certain countries, such as France, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, the majority of the populace are from other places, fleeing from persecution or poverty. Especially in the America continent, save from the First Nations, everyone was once an alien to the land. As we understand Jesus in His exile and displacement, we should understand the same displacement that is still acutely experienced by people around us – migrant workers, immigrants, asylum-seekers. As we think of Christ, we think in His grieving and sorrowful heart of an alien in Egyptian land.
What Christian are we, if we sit comfortably on our couches, whilst watching others roaming on the streets, demeaning them, teasing and malicing them, harming them with our words and deeds? Were we not instructed to strike our breasts, to make penance for ‘what we do and what we failed to do’? In James 2:15, have the Brother of Christ not rejected the false claim that our verbal patronising of our least brethren is insufficient and hypocritical? It must be the natural conclusion, then, for Christians to promote justice in society by both of individual and institutional means. (CCC 1916)
Our Brethren in Christ, when we think of Jesus and His Passion, what do we think of? As Bible recounts, Jesus blessed the ‘poor’, mourners, ‘the meek’, the ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’, ‘the merciful’, ‘the pure in heart’, ‘the peacemakers’, and ‘persecuted for righteousness’. Those wording are quite literal and exact. As long as we do not deceive ourselves, it is not hard to see who are such people – migrant workers, immigrants, mentally challenged people, those who are denied justice and legal recourse, those who gallantly help those in need, those who have little ill intents, those who are for the living and not wars, those who are downtrodden for the beliefs or good deeds they insist. Jesus taught us to be like that, to be blessed.
Those who have might must avail their freight to aid those who lack. We further cannot support any militaristic idea that hold soldiers to be morally pure, and waging wars as necessary and beneficial. Instead, those in the armed services have an obligation to suppress war, not inciting them. In no part of the Bible does God encourage the canonisation of soldiers, nor did the Bible refrain from criticising those holding guns (Matt 26:52). As mentioned in the Declaration, ‘we reject the false doctrine that the Church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day’. By selectively enforcing the Bible, using it as a pass for condoning, supporting, and waging wars, Christians are distorting the Holy Word, and by the nature, distorting Jesus. (John 1:1)
By the implication of our Baptism, by water or otherwise, we are dead with Jesus. However, it endows us with the undertaking to sacrifice for others. ‘When Jesus calls a man, He bids him come and die’. The line beautifully written by the person who died for preserving the Word of God, which lasts in eternity (Verbum Dei manet in aeternum), Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As Paul did, ‘proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance’ (Acts 28:31), we have an obligation to convey God’s unfettered message (2 Tim 2:9), where our love, not hatred, is for all peoples. By all peoples, we are reminded of the parable of Good Samaritans, where Jesus taught us that all peoples who showed mercy are our neighbours and deserving of love, and we should ‘go, and do likewise’. (Luke 10:37)
Even in most perilous political situations and milieux, Christians have a proven history of martyrdom, which is the entire history of our Church. Now, at our workplaces, in our communities, Internet, and especially in involuntary institutions, we must do our best, and more than our best, within the limit of preservation of our strength, to sacrifice for our lesser neighbours, without expectation of gain. As I, a transgender Christian living in China, have experienced first-hand, in the most impossible time people are still capable, if not more capable, to demonstrate how they follow the inner light of the Holy Ghost. With this confidence in Jesus Christ dying for us, we also die for others so they may live.
The Resurrection of Christ the Saviour conveys the message of hope. Where our actions and deeds are feeble, and oft-times sinful, our Lord will effectuate the final judgement, where all iniquities vanquish. With this confidence in His resurrection, we should keep our standards without compromising in darkest hours, and speak out them boldly, as God spoke boldly.
God is still speaking. In our ever-changing time, we are reminded to listen to His speech, and the crying out of His children. Where, for an example, our world is more forgiving on people who are discovering their sexual orientations and gender identities, we should use extra faculty to discern the Word of God, instead of using hatred to extinguish love.
God speaks, and God is to speak. As faithful disciples of God, we should be ever vigilant to listen to the cry of peoples. After all, we know the heart of sojourners, for we are sojourners in these lands. May the poor in spirit find comfort in our words and deeds, for our eyes have seen the salvation, ‘which you have prepared in the sight of all peoples’ (Luke 2:30-31). May the light of the Word cast out our hatred and darkness and grant us strength to speak with audacity for the humanity.