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.