and there was this woman. this large woman. with crooked teeth and an annoying way of speaking.(i bet you can't tell my inclination toward her!)
and she is Christian.
yup, she is. at least i'd think so. she loudly said words like 'HALLELUJAH'(that was much later on). but at that moment, a blind man selling tissues was saying(loudly) to her, 'no i don't want to talk about religion' and stuff like that. anyone could tell he was miffed.
and so was the lady.
at a traffic light, she prayed(loudly, with her eyes open, and in chinese) 'Lord please let it rain'
I was thinking, what for? i mean, the grass outside St Andrew's Cathedral looked pretty green. i couldn't see anyone crawling on the ground(the way they do in books and movies when they're lost in the desert and looking for water).
'please PUNISH all these people'
my eyes widened. Justin(he was with me, naturally)'s eyes widened. and no one else seemed to care.
Why are we Christians wishing judgement on non-Christians?
Why are we wishing on others the same punishment we would deserve?
Why?
What happened to grace and mercy? what happened to humility? what happened to meekness, to being sent out as lambs among wolves, to patience, kindness, forgetting wrongs, a lack of envy, and the whole load from 1 Corinthians 13?
here's one age-old question: What would Jesus have done?
would he have wished punishment on the people who rejected Him?
maybe we've forgotten, but at his last moments on the cross, in pain, at people's insults, he said 'Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing'.
imagine that.
'Father, forgive them'
'Father, punish them'
while i have not been ridiculed and rejected yet, here's what i think :
If we love the lost, we would be SAD at rejection. not bitter and angry. we would say 'Father, help them to listen', NOT 'Father, punish them.'
the new guy in my office told me, while he was going out with his friends, someone came up to him and said, 'if you do not believe in God, you're going to hell'.
well, very obviously, people do not like to find out they're going to hell. and they probably think that if they disbelieve it, it won't happen to them.
imagine saying 'I'm not gonna become a Christian because if i do, i don't need to go to hell!'
it's like they're a sucker for punishment.
but ok back to the serious stuff. it's like how children would close their eyes when they were in trouble, the logic being 'if i can't see him, he can't see me!'
pretty cute, but honestly, it's rather pitiful.
I think some of us Christians are a lot less helpful than we imagine ourselves to be.
that in trying to help some people get their one-way ticket to the pearly gates, we end up trying to give the ticket by SMACKING it on their noses and telling them to hold the ticket with said facial feature. that in trying to save, we hurt, maim, poison. in trying to show God's glory, we end up forfeiting it. albeit unwillingly. but we do.
it sucks when i feel like this. so helpless.
caught in between righteousness and grace, looking across a chasm at a blindfolded friend trying to build a bridge.
have we gone overboard? i get the feeling that if a stranger approaches you on a street, he's either a surveyor, an insurance salesman, someone trying to sell stuff for charity, or a street evangelist. and i dunno why but the last category seems to receive the most complains from my friends.
I believe we should show unconditional love.
i believe we can show unconditional love.
that we don't use love as a currency, as a reward, as bait.
but we give love, because love is not quantitative.
and we can give more and more love. because the more we give, the more we have.
Jesus could have thrown the first stone at the woman. out of everyone there, he was the only one who met the standard(although he set the standard. rather crafty way of stopping everyone to chuck granite chunks at the poor lady).
If He should have, he would have.
but he did not.
Jesus was(and since he is unchanging, IS) a radical.
so why are some of us going back to all that legalism?
'it's fair, i see' some of us may reply.
well it sounds like it's 'phar-i-see' if you say it really really fast.
it's not that we Christians disregard God's rules for living. no, we hold on to it. but we do not live by it.
2 commandments : Love God with all your heart, all your mind, all your soul. and also love your neighbour as yourself
and see how it has been changed to laws, rituals, restrictions, penalties.
we are a lot less helpful than we think we are.
to non-Christians who read this: i mean no harm to you. as much as I would like you to accept my Jesus, i would also like to treat you the same way i would if you were a Christian.
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