True Faith = Love and Justice!

Violence or Love – in the Name of God and Faith?

Abbas is awake at dawn. He hasn’t slept all night. He lay awake thinking about his family over 100 kilometres away, surviving he hopes, trapped under the bombing of his home region. His only objective, today, is to speak with them by phone. Every day at dawn he desperately calls to make sure they survived the night. Some days there is no communication, and he waits to hear. They have been displaced four times in the last year and are currently living in a tent. They have slept on the street, in mosques, abandoned buildings, anywhere they can. There is his wife and four children, 5 to 14 years old.

Abbas is a worker who commutes across the border for work. He worked in an iron factory. As the oldest member of his family, Abbas also has responsibility for his siblings and their families. Abbas was at work when members of the military came and harassed the workers, threatening to shoot them if they did not leave the factory and cross the border in a different region. It took him a few days to make the journey, along with 6000 of his fellow countrymen and women. When he passed checkpoints, soldiers took his money and belongings, leaving him only his phone. Other’s lost everything! They were also arrested, beaten, even made to ‘disappear.’ This followed the events of October 2023 in Israel.

Abbas is determined to find a way to return. “My wife wants me to go so we can die together” he adds. “It is hard for her to take care of the children. The more weeks go by, the more surviving is a miracle. There is no drinking water, and they can barely find food. Some days they drink the salty water from the sea. If they get sick, they can’t go to the hospital, as it is overcrowded with trauma patients and not safe.”  He continues in a sobbing voice: “My five-year-old asked me the other day ‘Dad, why do you let me starve? Dad, other kids, their father died with them, so don’t let us die alone’. I don’t know what to reply so I strive to find comforting words, but he replies, ‘Don’t lie to me dad’. Come now, so we die together.” “Because of the constant bombing, it has become customary in Gaza to make people identifiable, in case they are killed, by writing their names on their bodies: a hand, an arm, a leg or the neck. My wife and three of my kids wrote their names on themselves but she could not do it on the youngest. It was too painful.” “What will our lives be like after they have finished bombing? Streets, hospitals, universities and schools are all destroyed. This is not right, I am a good citizen, I work, I pay my taxes and so on. I should have basic human rights. Stop the suffering” concludes Abbas.

This is one of an untold number of stories from Palestine and across our world. Warfare and conflicts rage and vulnerable, innocent people die or suffer intolerably. There are too many sad stories from a land where religion is supposed to be central but becomes a weapon against those who are different. In the name of faith and God, people kill and harm each other, but in reality, God and faith have nothing to do with it. It is greed, fear, control, hatred, and myriad other reasons for human beings to take up arms and hurt each other.

In other parts of the world religion, joins politics and business to oppose life and freedom, oppressing the vulnerable and marginalised, to maintain status quo, control, wealth and power. When people of faith join in the violence and hatred, they deny faith and God and pursue a human agenda devoid of the morality and love and denying life. 
This week in Mark’s story of Jesus (Mark 12:38-44), we hear a story of Jesus teaching in the temple precincts. He notes the religious leaders who strut around with a sense of self-importance. They are conspicuous by their clothing and like to be greeted with respect in public spaces. They demand the best seats, the ones of honour, in banquets and synagogues. In a cutting remark, Jesus says: ‘They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.’ These are men with special privilege and status.

He then sat down opposite the treasury and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury – this is a posture of judgement. A very poor widow came and placed the smallest amount of money into the treasury. Jesus commended her for her faithfulness, giving everything she had, whilst the wealthy gave from their abundance. So, there it is, a stark contrast between the hypocrisy of the Scribal class and the deep piety of the poor woman. But is it? Is that all there is?

The story is really a repudiation of the faith, the practice and religiosity of the Scribal class and religious leaders. The setting is the Temple, where God’s justice and the reorientation of life and the world is centred. Some of the money and offerings made into the Temple treasury were intended to be redistributed to the poor and struggling but were devoured in the costs of running the Temple (and possibly made their way into the accounts of the rich leaders as well?). The poor and vulnerable, who came for help – especially widows and orphans – were ripped off by religious people who took advantage of them and left them destitute whilst lining their own pockets. The religious leaders, by ‘their long prayers’ and respectability earned the right to administer the affairs of the poor, widows, for example – for a fee. This was notorious for embezzlement and abuse, rather than the protection and care of the vulnerable!

The most significant condemnation lies in the observation that the Scribal class had so conditioned a sense of responsibility in the very poorest people that it is right, and what God desires, for them to give away everything they have to the Temple. Religion has become a destructive force that keeps people oppressed and impoverished, whilst giving power and wealth to others. It maintains an unjust status quo. Here, the Temple system exploits widows rather than protect them. Jesus leaves the Temple for the last time, in disgust at how religious leadership has so abused and reversed the way of God, the way of love and justice, care and compassion, life, hope and freedom. 
How hard it is to look at our world and see how religiosity and the name of ‘faith’ is used to uphold systems of exploitation, abuse, oppression and to cause much suffering and violence. As this story of Jesus highlights, this isn’t faith that God inspires. It isn’t the way of deep spirit and love. It is human fear, hatred, greed, control, and the politics of power and the status quo being rigidly maintained. Whether the story of a poor widow conditioned by a faith that urges her to give everything she has and needs for life as an act of piety, and to trust the very people who will rip her off, or the story of Abbas and his suffering family caught in a very religious/political/human conflict and power struggle. God’s way is generous care and compassion, inclusive love and liberation.

It is hard to reconcile people who claim to have experienced grace, then refusing grace and freedom to another, whether in the Christian lands or the land of a poor widow and suffering man called Abbas and his impoverished, traumatised family. When God’s name is invoked in the cause of oppression and violence, it is not God being served!