Regardless of religious or political system, human beings have shown ourselves to be the
cruelest of all of God’s creatures since the dawn of time through endless warfare,
enslavement, unspeakable violence and genocide perpetrated one against another.
Despite gazillions of laws created in the attempt to harness our penchant for cruelty, as
ancient records testify little has changed, merely the scope and ferocity of our levels of
hatred and cruelty.
Here in the United States, that predisposition was woven into the very fabric of our
nation since the first European immigrant set foot upon our shores. In the effort to
establish and maintain both safety and economic security, the White humans from the
“old country” established systems of cruelty beyond imagining in the genocide of the
Native Peoples encountered here (“The only good Indian is a dead Indian.”), as well as
the enslavement of countless innocent African People brought here at enormous profit
as chattel in the bowels of slave ships and generations of their descendants.
Yes, laws both ancient and modern have been passed to address these horrors, but the
cruelty lives on as revealed with increasing persistence right in our own backyards and
living rooms in the denial of basic human rights and dignity to any human being who
doesn’t pass the absolutely ungodly, fundamentally evil, and essentially meaningless
“White skin test”. Native Peoples remain relegated to occupy land deemed useless by the
selfish and greedy, and Americans of African descent are forced to live in poverty
generation after generation with no ability to accumulate wealth in any form to pass on
to their children. And when a million or more desperate Black people, mostly male,
attempt to lift themselves out of poverty in one of the few (generally illegal) ways
available to them, they are returned to slavery—only this time behind prison walls.
And the list goes on to include Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Arab Americans,
and so many others.
In today’s America, joining the ranks of those who feel the sting of our nation’s cruelty
are those classified as immigrants, refugees seeking a glimmer of hope for a future by
finding asylum in the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave”. We have only to
read or hear today’s top stories to find out how that’s working out for them.
While many Americans who identify themselves as Christian would prefer to ignore
Christ Jesus altogether, or paint Our Lord as somehow supportive of their enormously
cruel beliefs and behaviors, the author of St. Matthew’s Gospel reminds us pointedly
that God in Christ demands something very different from true disciples:
[Jesus said,] "When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then
he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he
will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,
and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left….[H]e will say to
those at his left hand, "You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire
prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was
thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,
naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.'
Then they also will answer, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a
stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?' Then he will answer
them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not
do it to me.' And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into
eternal life."
(Matthew 25: 31-33, 41-46)
Sounds pretty damned clear to me—a stark reminder that we have a long way to go and
a lot of work to do in getting there.
Charles+