How A Judgmental Mind Blinds Itself

On Saturday morning the historic city of Yogyakarta was shaken by a tremor registering at 6.3 on the Richter scale, the third time in as many years in a row that Indonesia has been hit by a natural disaster of tragic proportion. The fatality this time is in the neighborhood of 5,700 people, last time I checked, maybe more by now. A friend of mine has been directly affected; though his family is fine, they have suffered major property damages.

Many Christians would claim, and indeed have claimed, that acts of God such as the disasters last Saturday's catastrophe is a punishment, or at the very least a warning. But let me ask you this: a punishment against whom? If the repeated showing on Indonesia national television of the bodies of children who died in the Boxing Day tsunami made me realize anything, it was that the most innocent are also those that are the least able to protect themselves from the harm that these catastrophes bring.

Yes, I admit that God has used disasters such as famine or diseases to punish and warn entire peoples, even if it means killing off their children. You only need to look at the Old Testament to see examples of that. God's justice is not our justice, His sense of fairness is not the same as the one we understand. But I'm getting kind of sick of the way Christians (and too many in Indonesia itself) see tragedies such as the Boxing Day tsunami and Saturday's earthquake in Java as doomsday warnings or punishments from God and nothing else but that. Whenever these things happen too many Christians decide to put on their holier-than-thou glasses and point their fingers at the victims, telling them that they better repent or get something worse, instead of lending them a helping hand. And these glasses blind them to the possibility that God might have allowed such terrible things to happen not to show his wrath but his love, not through the disasters themselves (he is not a sadistic God) but through the opportunities that come in their wake. If the Bible is to be believed at all, God usually works through us, his people. And it is also through us that I believe he wants to use these opportunities to show his love. He wants to make us the extensions of his healing hands. And I believe he has equipped and called us to do this.

But the problem is we are often too blinded by our own self-righteousness, choosing instead to blame the victims of disasters for their misfortune. A classic example is the way some Christians blamed the Acehnese (in general) for being hardcore, fundamentalist Muslims, thus invoking the wrath of God. If that is the way we think of God, he might as well be the vengeful God of those who terrorise in the name of Islam! But no! Our God, as embodied in Christ, is not only a loving God, but is love itself by nature.

A related problem is the unwillingness some of us show in helping disaster victims such as those in Aceh that do not share our faith. We are only willing to help our fellow Christians. Would Jesus have done this? Did always insist on people believing in him as the Messiah before healing them? "Love your enemies. What is the use of being good to your own friends?" he said, "Sinners do that too" Instead, many believed him because of the acceptance he showed them. Sure, there will always be those hostile to the faith that would always cynically mutter that we only do good to unbelievers because we want them to become Christians. Maybe so! But we also do it because the Christ we believe, and whose example we follow, is a God of love! And when we decide to take off our glasses of self-righteous, holier-than-thou attitude, and instead see the victims the way our Father does, regardless of their religion, then we become his partner in redeeming their misfortune into an opportunity to show his love. And then his light within us will shine in their darkest hours as a city on a hilltop.

"You Are Not Human!"

"Ecce homo!"

"Look at this man!" It was the cry of Roman governor Pontius Pilate in his attempt to appeal to the people's sense of pity at the sight of the broken and battered Jesus (and to save himself the trouble of making a decision over a politically-charged public execution). Pilate likely made the famous exclamation more for his own sake than for Jesus', but one thing recently stood out to me: Pilate, the leader of the Romans that colonised His people, was probably the only one among Jesus' opponents on that day that recognised Him as a man, a human being.

In the eyes of many of the people present there, and especially those that want Him dead, Jesus was reduced to a "blasphemer", an "impostor" or whatever else they chose to call him; anything but a "man". I believe that at that very moment while they consciously denied Jesus His divinity, they also unconsciously denied Him His humanity. And how do they do this? By ignoring the fact that the Man they were condemning to death with such passion was, in fact, a human being; that He therefore might have be someone's son, someone's brother, someone's uncle, or someone's best friend. Never mind that an innocent person's life might be depending on Him, or that He had done so much good for so many people. To them He was just "the enemy", because had they recognised Him as much a human being as they were, it would have been so much harder for them to condemn Him. It would have meant that they would be condemning "one of their own".

In anthropology this process is often called "de-humanization". The technique is still used either consciously or unconsciously around the world today - in may places, in many contexts, in many ways. Even in the church (more about that later)! In the military enemy soldiers might be referred to as "bogeys" or "hostiles" and never as "enemy soldiers", as calling them so might cause an unwanted, unconscious identification with them. It is easy to blow the brains of nameless, impersonal "hostiles", but much harder to kill a fellow soldier, even if he is on the enemy's side. Over the past century, this process of de-humanization has facilitated human beings in killing other human beings, both soldiers and civilians, paving the way for countless massacres and genocides, simply by denying them their humanity, substituting that identity with terms such as "subhumans".

It is truly sad that while Jesus was subjected to this process of de-humanization, many of those that claim to be His followers today subject others to the same process without a second thought. How and when in the world have we done this? you might ask. When have we ever called other people "subhumans", much less killed them? For most of us, probably never (hopefully). But unconsciously the same paradigm that facilitates such evil may exist in our minds; we might still deny people their humanity.

We do this when we refer treat people as numbers, the same way Nazi concentration camp guards refused to recognise prisoners' names and referred to them by numbers instead of their names. We do this when we refuse to recognize people's individuality, demanding that they become exactly like us or else withdraw our love for them. The Nazis' replacement of prisoners' identity with numbers had the same effect. We do this when we see and treat human beings as "Jews" or "niggers" or "Abos" or "Arabs" or "homos" or "the white guy" and never as "Allan" or "Lisa" or "Michael" or "Cathy" or "Abdullah" or "Muhammad" or "Andi". Heck, we even do it when we treat people as "souls" to be "won" rather than people, individuals with feelings and life experiences like you and I, to be brought into a relationship with God. (And this is why I can get so pedantic about calling people "souls".) The fact is, we de-humanise people whenever we reduce them to a word, a term or a concept, no matter how derogatory (or not). We de-humanize people whenever we deny them their unique individuality and the complex individual identities that come with being human.

What was Jesus like? How would He treat people? When other people saw a Samaritan woman, an outcast belonging to an enemy group, Jesus saw a spiritually thirsty individual with a long and very probably painful history of broken relationships. When they saw an adulteress, a sinner ready to be judged and executed, Jesus saw a broken, repentant woman ready to change at the first taste of mercy. When they saw a greedy tax collector, a traitor to his own people, Jesus saw a man who probably lonely and didn't have too many friends (and not just because he was short), who was ready to change at the first encounter with grace.

Human beings are complex creatures. A "subhuman" or a "soul" is probably not, because they are just words that we impose on other human beings, partly to make them easier for us to handle. Jesus understood the complexity of people, of individuals. Maybe this was partly why He can forgive us better than we can ever forgive each other. That, and He also experienced what de-humanization was like first hand on that most fateful of days. The question for us now that believe in Him is this: will we see other human beings that are different from us the same way our Master did, with the dignity that they were created with and a recognition of their humanity (and human failings)? Or will we treat them, all beloved of our Father in heaven, the same way the mob treated Him on that day - and implicitly told Him through their words anc actions, "You are not human!"?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to The Loonsome Man for giving initial comments that influenced this entry's final version.