“And he rose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” [Luke 15:20, RSV]
(L) Pope Francis washing feet at a youth detention centre; (M) Jesus Falls, by Dorothy Riley; (R) forgiveness and reconciliation.
Karl Barth, the most influential Protestant theologian of the 20th century, has famously advocated preaching with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. It is of course good to emphasise Barth’s stress on real life relevance and application of the Bible. The danger is in misquoting Barth when we stress news-relevancy without due regard to his famous admonition that Christians should evaluate major news events in the light of the Bible and not the other way round. The Bible should inform the world, not the world the Bible.
What do we see happening around the world today?
Invading our consciousness these days are crude and concerted effort at excluding certain human groups from accepted circles. As we settle down in the second decade of the twenty-first century, ought we not consider such human behaviour as barbarity within civilization, evil among the good, and crime against the other’s right in human dignity? And yet, life in recent human history presents us with a disturbing reality. Otherness, the simple fact of being different in some way, has come to be defined as in and of itself evil. It behooves us all to beware the source of all this anti-civilization. A few short-listed examples offer food for serious thought:
- Racial prejudice in America, the so-called leader of the “democratic free-world” and “beacon of human rights”, shows up a nation of a glaring history of slavery, and of ongoing biting reality of racial discrimination.
- Hatred and violence towards the LBGTQ around the world is a self-righteous denial of the human person and the fundamental human dignity in those of different sexual orientations. This hatred is legally sanctioned in written law in some countries.
- Systemic suppression of American Red Indians and native populations in Canada and Australia has been brutally carried out via the imposition of an “assimilation policy” that insolently exalted the “civilized culture” of the White race. This has historically been viciously applied to exterminate not only the allegedly inferior customs and traditions of the original native culture but also the young children of those native tribes.
- Ethnic cleansing in Africa and Europe has blatantly and criminally been legitimized on the ground of the rightful exclusion of the victims’ right to live.
- Wars and atrocities both from internal strife in different corners of the globe and through external aggression have witnessed to a senseless intolerance of what is different religiously, culturally, or ideologically.
- Without doubt, we live in a world of holocausts, gulags, killing fields, suicide bombings, and ethnic cleansing. But this is a familiar and typical Western list. It is insidiously incomplete. One must extend the list considerably to include many more, including but not restricted to White Police brutality in predominantly White nations, the outrageous infamy of gun-violence in America, the pathological colonialist mentality of European and American origins, and the atrocious American invasions of other sovereign nations with impunity, despite international law. In short, the much-touted “world order” is American order! The Mafia might have started in Italy, but America is second to none in its international operation. Untold human atrocities in the last century or so are principally and directly attributable to the many uniquely American-made wars around the globe. The long list includes the American invasions, without United Nations’ sanction, of Vietnam, North Korea, Afganistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria and many, many more. Never has there been a prosecution against the United States of America or any of its war-initiating presidents and their British sidekicks for war crimes and crimes against humanity simply because of the sheer and ugly power of the American hegemony. Their tight grip on the international media has hitherto all but assured that only the Western narrative gets heard. Generations of people since World War II have had their minds and visions filtered through the fake-news machine of USA and NATO to see all aggressions by the West as legitimate and good and all actions by other world powers as evil. That the USA is, in reality, the axis of evil, the pariah state of the world, and the terrorist nation, contrasts sharply with the American web of lies regularly spewing from the CIA and the powerful American media (often in synchrony with UK and NATO allies) to mold the impressions of the gullible world. By and by, the people of the lies even believe and live in their own lies. Great evils have been perpetrated and continue to be perpetrated by American-led lies. So “poisoned”, untold generations in the west are sadly incapacitated from committing to works of justice and world peace.
- And, of course, currently the dire threats and political-economic exclusionary manoeuvres (trade embargo, sanction, membership exclusion from world bodies and international monetary linkage) under an American-led coalition specifically targeting an emerging Chinese-Superpower (and a re-emergent Russia) are nothing short of an insolent, duplicitous and evil American-led “democracy” pretext. After a shameless and inhumane run for a few decades of an imperialist and colonialist era (the Europeans themselves having had the imperialist ways on their own for a few centuries), the American-led western economic and military bully-power is now facing fierce and matching resistance from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Afganistan in the Middle East, India, China, Russia and North Korea in the East, and countries in Latin America, the Pacific Islands and Africa. Humanity is witnessing an earth-shaking awakening and the growing pain is all too obvious. In the face of the twin reality of a flagging U.S. hegemonic superpower and a rising hitherto-unknown in-your-face resistance from other rising powers around the globe, the insolent and strong-but-weakening American “imperial empire” is resorting to rallying other would-be associates in its desperate attempt to form a coalition to exclude the rest of the world from power-ascension on the world stage. Signs of desperation are palpable. Decades of globalization (initially aimed at the lopsided benefit of the West) have resulted in a world more closely linked and interdependent than the West had foreseen or desired; tough exclusionary measures now are only hurting all sides economically, the bullies included. Worst of all, this American struggle to cling to its hegemonic power creates on the horizon an ongoing threat of an outbreak of a major world-war. If ever it comes to that, the inevitable result will be a catastrophic destruction of the peace and order of the entire universe. In the end, only the realization of the scale of such a devastation may work as the ultimate deterrence against the initiation of this unthinkable war.
With the benefit of our seasonal remembrance of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, how might we think of “salvation” for the human race in these circumstances?
It may seem quite different from our common imagination, but the key metaphor of salvation in the New Testament is actually reconciliation. We need salvation, for we have sinned. From the time of Adam (man of earth), this is what the Book of Genesis in symbolic and narrative language seeks to tell the story of human existence and its historical reality (see CCC, 390). The creation accounts suggest that “human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbour and with the earth itself… These three vital relationships have been broken, both outwardly and within us. This rupture is sin” (Laudato Si’, 66). God initiated the project of human salvation to overcome this sin-induced rupture.
Salvation is first and foremost a matter of humans reconciling with God, and from there, reconciling with neighbours (who have hurt you or whom you have hurt, whom you think are unacceptable or who think you are unacceptable). It is not in the first place a question of individual salvation. The issue concerns the salvation of the human race. That having been said, in any broken relationship at the personal level, reconciliation does not take place other than by repentance (turning from a certain mindset) forgiveness, mutual acceptance, restoration of peace, and finally embrace as a sign of peace. This was something the Suffering Lord taught by an enacted symbol when he washed disciples’ feet at the Last Supper and, throughout his ministry, when he welcomed sinners and ate with them, when he healed the sick and both physically and spiritually accepted the “unacceptable”, most strikingly the lepers, by the symbol of acceptance – the physical, human touch. What society rejected, Jesus welcomed, accepted and embraced, giving those “social rejects” the comfort and consolation that they “belong” and are an equal part of the human community. By his human touch and acceptance, a physical cure carries a far deeper dimension of spiritual healing. It is deeply reconciling.
In his deeply thoughtful work, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, Miroslav Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. As a Christian theologian, his fundamental thesis is that the message of the cross is inconsistent with treating people differently and worse, rejecting them and killing them, based on ethnic or other differences. With his Croatian background, Volf writes with traumatic and powerful personal experience of the Croatian-Serbian war. He has had to deal personally with Serbian fighters who raped, pillaged, put in concentration camps, and murdered his fellow Croatians. These helped him see “exclusion” as a powerful, contagious, and destructive evil. Yet, in combating that evil, he came down in the end on the side of taking up his cross and following Jesus.
In what must have been excruciating pain, Volf insists that if the healing word of the gospel is to be heard today, Christian theology must find ways of speaking that address the hatred of the other. Hatred and exclusion go hand in hand. Adopting the New Testament metaphor of salvation as reconciliation, Volf proposes the idea of embrace as a theological response to the problem of exclusion. Today, exclusion is the primary sin that skews our perceptions of reality and causes us to react out of fear and anger to all those who are not one of us. The Lord Jesus dying on the cross compels us to learn that salvation comes neither only as we are reconciled to God, nor only as we “learn to live with one another”. Salvation, Volf contends, does not come unless we take the dangerous and costly step of opening ourselves to the other, of enfolding him or her in the same embrace with which we have been embraced by God.
On the cross, Jesus spiritually embraced all his enemies, praying for those who prosecuted him.
- In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus has intentionally left an open-ended conclusion. Just as Rembrandt has represented it in art, the younger son has knelt before the forgiving father and accepted his embrace. There can be no “salvation” for the elder son unless and until he gives up his self-righteous exclusion of his younger brother, comes down from his elevated location, crosses the drain (the barrier of prejudice), repents, and kneels down to accept the father’s embrace.
Volf does accept that a limited exclusion can be a meaningful distinction between persons, and is necessary for self-identification. So for example, we can accept that there needs to be national borders to distinguish nationalities. However, humans are inescapably and intrinsically intertwined: we are, at the same time, both in separation from and in belonging to another. So we welcome and embrace visitors of good will from other nations. But in completely excluding his father and his younger brother from his circle of the “acceptable”, the elder son in the Parable marred himself.
The drama of the crucified Jesus helps us see the dual aspect as a call on the dual work of exclusion and embrace. First, is the work of limited exclusion in service only of distinction between persons and self-identity. Second, this limited exclusion must always be accompanied by a daring embrace in service of an impassioned communion between persons and of healing. Volf’s own experience of the atrocities of the war uniquely prepared him to deliver this message which is capable of changing the world. It is a message which begins with a return to the cross of Jesus. And if we listen to Volf with care and work on his proposal with diligence, we will also begin to understand the message of “exclusion and embrace”. Hopefully, we may then know how to begin to change our thinking, language and assumptions, and to avoid the “natural” tendency of fallen humanity to exclude the other. Then, following Jesus the true “elder son”, we may refuse to reject. We shall learn to set meaningful boundaries. But, we shall also learn to embrace. We shall advocate non-violence in a world of violence and bring to the world around each one of us the heart and message of Jesus.
Copyright © Dr. Jeffrey & Angie Goh, May 2022. All rights reserved.
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