Now is the time to fight for justice and compassion

So Australia now has a more selfish government. That's not just my opinion. That's the opinion I've seen stated in any number of articles, posts and tweets.

And it seems that this was the Australia Tony Abbott and the Liberal National Party were trying to get people to vote for. Their pre-election material focused a lot on jobs, the economy and roads and not at all on helping the disadvantaged or the marginalised. There was a lot of emphasis on growth and the economy and not much on justice and compassion. Their pre-election promises including cutting foreign aid, stopping the boats and ending the carbon tax.

In a recent article for the Guardian, George Monbiot said "Abbott’s policies are really about removing the social and environmental protections enjoyed by all Australians, to allow the filthy rich to become richer – and filthier."  (If Abbott is elected, Australia'snatural wonders will gradually be rubbed away)

Is this the Australia we want? Well according to the election results, yet it is. Or at least it's the Australia that some of us voted for.

But not everybody is happy with it. Since Saturday night, my Twitter and Facebook feeds have been filled with comments from people who are disappointed with the result. Not all of us wanted a more selfish Australia after all.

So what do we do now? Vent on social media, throw up our hands and start counting down to the next election? Decide that the fight for justice and compassion is over for another three years?

No.

Now is the time that those of us who don't want a more selfish Australia need to fight even harder for justice and compassion. If we are to live in a more selfish Australia, those of us who want something different need to ensure our voices are heard.

We do need to accept the result. But we don't need to just lie back and accept the fallout.

I hope that the many people who voiced disgust at the result on social media also tell the newly elected government what they think. I hope they write letters to their MPs telling them what they want Australia to look like. I hope they protest against every decision the LNP Government makes that they don't like.

As Martin Luther King Jr said, 'Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.'

So let's make sure we're not silent.

But our fight for justice and compassion shouldn't end there.

The commentators who have said Australia under a LNP-led government would be more selfish have got it wrong in one respect - it's the government that will be more selfish, not necessarily the country. And the country is filled with many people who don't have to be selfish just because our government's policies are.

Justice and compassion should never be relegated to the governmental sphere, regardless of who's leading the country. It should start in our own lives.

So now, more than ever, let us be the ones to show kindness and compassion to others. Let us to be the ones to help our neighbours in need, wherever in this world they may live. Let us be the ones to look after this earth and do all we can to protect it. Let us be the one to treat all people, regardless of country of birth or religion or sexual orientation or socio-economic status, equally and justly. Let us be the ones to help the oppressed and the marginalised and the disadvantaged. Let us be the ones to let our own lives reflect the kind of country we wish we had.

Seriousness of sin

Before I start this post on the seriousness of sin, I want to say three things.

1. We are all sinners.
2. Sinners need love and compassion.
3. We are all sinners.

So this post is not going to be about pointing fingers and judging people. That’s never been my approach and I’m not about to start now. It is, however, about recognising that sin is serious. And we do nobody any favours when we pretend that it isn’t.

Many Christians lean towards the love and compassion approach to Christianity. I have nothing against this. I’m all for love and compassion. I believe if everyone had more love and compassion in their lives, the world would be a better place.

When people sin, they do one of two things. They either feel sorrow for it or they don’t. If they don’t feel sorrow, generally nothing anyone says is going to make them feel sorrow. If they do, they feel bad enough on their own, without having other people make them feel worse.

But the love and compassion we extend to others should not involve saying that what they have done is quite okay.

Well, not always. Sometimes people feel bad about something when they really have no need to. Sometimes they exaggerate what they have done wrong and have an unhealthy sense of guilt. And so the best thing is often to say, ‘You know something, what you did wasn’t really that bad.’

When someone feels upset about something, it’s normal to want to make them feel better. It’s the loving and compassionate thing to do. But sometimes what we say to ‘make someone feel better’ doesn’t line up with God’s view of sin. The whole, ‘Well maybe you did have an affair with your husband’s best friend. But lots of people have affairs nowadays’ kind of approach.

And sometimes people don’t need to feel better. Their sorrow for sin is a good thing. It’s what leads to repentance and submission to God’s will. Sometimes making someone feel better is the worst thing you could do for them.

In the beginning I listed three points. Okay, it was more like two. The first and third point was that we are all sinners. Remembering this should help prevent us becoming too judgemental. But it should never lead to a downplaying of sin.

Sometimes the truth that we are all sinners morphs into a ‘We are all sinners, so sin doesn’t really matter’ kind of attitude. ‘After all, what is one sin amongst so many?’ I’ve had someone say to me, ‘Do you honestly think God is going to care if you do this, when there are so many people doing much worse things?’

Short answer, yes. Because sin does matter.

Sin is not like littering. You know how sometimes you’re in a public place, and there’s rubbish everywhere. You kind of look at your empty chip packet or soft drink can and go, ‘I should just toss it on the ground. It’s not going to make any difference. There’s so much rubbish here already.’

Well sin is not like that. Sin is not just one tiny spec in a sin-filled world, hardly noticeable from God’s perspective. Each sin is important. Each sin is an offence against God.

I was praying in Church the other day, looking at the wooden carving of Jesus’ crucifixion, thinking about how He died for our sins. And I thought I can never fully grasp that. My mind can never capture the entirety of what that means. I know Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. And it’s been repeated so often it almost sounds like a cliché. Which is sad in itself, really. But Jesus dying for the sins of the whole world is such a staggering idea. I can’t even begin to appreciate how truly astounding it is.

So I stopped thinking about how Jesus died for our sins and started thinking about how he died for my sins. Not from the point of view that He died just for me. But from the point of view that my sins put him there. My sins nailed God to the cross. If I was the only person in the world, or if I was the only sinner in the world and everyone else was perfect, Jesus would have still been crucified. He would still have undergone unimaginable agony. The suffering that my sins alone would have caused him are immense.

I can’t even grasp that. I will never fully understand just how much he suffered for my sins. And I will never be as thankful for it as I should be.

Perhaps it’s better that way. Perhaps if I did understand and appreciate it properly, I would never get off my knees.

Jesus Christ had love and compassion. Jesus Christ who died on a cross, in agony, suffering for what we have done, paying the price for our sins.

(Image details: Basilique Saint-Quentin, France - Crucifixion)

Understanding Jesus' Love

For my theology unit, one of the readings, Divine Teaching and Christian Beliefs (McIntosh, 2008), discusses the idea that theological beliefs could be tested by their effect upon the person with those beliefs. In other words, good practice equals right beliefs. McIntosh also discussed John Henry Newman’s idea that you can tell whether someone has healthy faith by whether they have love and compassion.

I disagreed with this view. Firstly, because Christians with good beliefs often do bad things. This doesn’t necessary mean their beliefs are wrong.

Secondly, it is not always easy to see what good practice - or even loving others - actually means. There are many Christians who all believe that they are modelling a Christian life of love, who are actually behaving in very different ways to one another.

How can we decide who is right? And if we start deciding that someone has an unhealthy faith because they are not loving, is it really that they are acting without love or is it simply that our idea of love is different to theirs?

Most people would agree that Jesus is our best example of how to love others. But still there is disagreement as to how we should love others, even when following his example.

To some, Jesus’ example is clear. He showed compassion and love on all occasions. Therefore, there should be no disagreement as to what our love should look like.

But Jesus’ example was not clear. Although he showed compassion, he also said things like:

‘You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?’ (Matthew 23:33)

And:

‘And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. (Matthew 11:23).

Many Christians would suggest that mentioning hell to people is not a loving act. And yet if we are to hold Jesus up as the perfect example of love, we have to face the fact that Jesus mentioned hell.

The problem is that although Jesus modelled love perfectly, it is not always so easy to understand. It can’t be summed up in six easy to understand dot-points. It is not a one-sided view of love, that only seeks to love people in one way. It loves people in very different ways. And quite frankly, Jesus’ love is mind-boggling at times. Just when we think we understand Jesus’ love, He seems to approach it from a completely different direction.

I think the greatest mistake we can make is starting to believe we understand Jesus’ love. The first point is that we are not God. We cannot understand God’s love, because our minds our limited. God’s love is so much bigger than what we can comprehend.

Secondly, I think when we start believing we understand Jesus’ love, there’s a danger we may be seeing it from only one perspective. There is also the danger here that we may take that one perspective as the rule by which all our loving actions should be measured against. We must remember to consider the whole of Jesus’ actions and words, not just those that fit into our idea of what love is like.

It’s interesting to think about the Gospels from the point of view of the Apostles. I’m sure there would have been many times when they thought they were starting to understand where Jesus was coming from. But then Jesus goes and does something completely unexpected. Surely there were moments when they thought, ‘That doesn’t fit into my own ideas about who Jesus is. I’m going to have to rethink it all now.’

We like to put people in boxes. We like to figure out where they’re coming from and try and match all their actions up with that. But Jesus was far bigger than our little boxes. We can’t even imagine a box big enough to contain him. Whenever we think his example of love is easy to understand, what we’re really doing is reducing Jesus to a box that doesn’t extend beyond our own mind.

Jesus did not just have one approach to love. He didn’t come at love from the one angle. But we do. We tend to stress one aspect of love and ignore the others. We see love through very limited eyes. We cannot ever fully grasp how big love can be. Because we only ever see a tiny part of it.

Yes, we must always look to Jesus as an example of how to love. But we must never make the mistake of believing that we completely understand that example. We never will. Our minds (and our hearts) are too limited. His love is far bigger than our own ideas. And just when we think we finally get it, that we know how to love and what love means, Jesus is likely to do something completely unexpected. And we may have to rethink it all.

(Image details: Holy Trinity by Botticelli.)

Love and Compassion in a Virtual World

In Australia recently, a teenager committed suicide about being bullied on the internet. Although I’m not a teenager and I wouldn’t exactly call it bullying, nor did the episode leave me feeling at all distraught, let alone suicidal, I too have experienced a fair bit of nastiness from people over the internet.

It left me wondering why people seem to be so cruel when the internet is involved. And whether we treat people differently on the internet than we do face to face. And most importantly, how should we interact with others in cyberspace?

When Jesus told his disciples that the greatest commandment was to love others, they could never have foreseen a world in which we communicate with people on the other side of the world. We write messages and interact with others who we may never see and never meet, who often seem not quite real to us. Not only that, but we ourselves can communicate in such a way that we remain mostly anonymous. We are virtual people talking to virtual people, living in virtual realities.

So does interacting in a virtual world mean we are only to love others virtually? Or does love and compassion have no place on the internet at all? Or should we always seek to treat others with dignity, love and compassion, regardless of how we are interacting with them?

It almost sounds like the question the disciples asked Jesus. Who exactly is our neighbour? Back then, I’m sure they were thinking of whether their neighbour was their friend or their relative or the people of their home town or a fellow Jew. When Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus expanded the idea of neighbour to include much more than they would have imagined.

Today, we might ask ‘Well who is my neighbour?’ Is it just the people I can see and touch and know. And I’m pretty sure that Jesus would expand our idea of neighbour to include even those people we only ‘meet’ on a computer screen. Even if we don’t know their name, even if we don’t know what they look like, even if they’re misrepresenting themselves, they are still our neighbour.

It is tempting to treat people in cyberspace differently than how we treat people we meet face to face. One reason why we may treat people differently on the internet is we are anonymous. The face that many of us show to the world is not a true reflection of what’s in our hearts. We treat each other with love and compassion, but our love and compassion only goes skin-deep. We act in a certain way because we don’t want to lose friends, or gain the disapproval of others.

The internet strips away many of these reasons. We cannot lose friends, because we don’t know the people we are communicating with. And if people disapprove, it doesn’t really matter, because they don’t know who we really are. In fact, the internet can often be an excuse to act out what really is in our heart, without fear of being found out or judged.

Jesus said that it’s what’s in our heart that matters. And the way we act towards others on the internet may be a good guide as to what we’re really like inside. We may think we are nice and fair and kind. But if we don’t act that way when we're anonymous, then perhaps we’re not really that way at all.

And we should also remember that just because we have certain thoughts in our mind, doesn’t mean we should put them out there where they can hurt other people. The fact we think something doesn’t mean we should write it. If what we are thinking is hurtful or mean, we should probably try to readjust our heart, rather than letting it all out on the internet.

Another reason we may be tempted to be cruel in cyberspace is we don’t know the people we are communicating with. And it’s harder to care about people who we don’t know. Different people will reveal different aspect of themselves. But for some of the people we interact with online, we know nothing more than the name they have chosen to use. We don’t know about their families or their friends or their problems or their lives. It is harder to care for people, when we know so little.

Not only do we know so little about them, but we see so little about how our words can hurt them. When we talk to someone in real life, we can usually tell when we have upset or offended someone or hurt somebody’s feelings. On the internet, we only know what someone chooses to reveal to us. Not only that, but we do not have to face their reactions to us if we don’t want to. We switch off the computer and no longer have to deal with it.

Sometimes it’s hard to even remember that they are real people. They feel a bit like the Microsoft Help paperclip. Just part of our computer experience. We turn the computer off and the person goes away. We read their comments. We interact with them. But we get no sense of who they really are, and so it’s easy to forget that they really are someone. They’re not just a character in a software program. They are real people who lead real lives. They care. They cry. They feel. And most importantly, God knows who they are. They are real people to Him. People that God cares about. And so we should care about them too.

(Image Details - The Good Samaritan - George Frederic Watts.

Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)