NEVER A WORD ABOUT REGIME CHANGE
by adam harbinson
Do you ever get the impression that the world is growing crazier by the day? I mean, for the first time in hundreds of years we have witnessed not one, but two members of the House of Lords being suspended, because of greed and abuse of power. Then Sir Peter Viggers claimed expenses of £1645 for a floating duck island for his little feathered friends and offered this apology; ‘The claims I made were in accordance with the rules, and were all approved by the fees office.’ And to cap it all, the Speaker, who is the highest authority of the House of Commons is forced to resign because he was ‘a dogged defender of the way things are' – in other words, this is the way we do things around here, we’re privileged, how dare anyone use the Freedom of Information Act to interfere with the status quo? In a word, he normalised greed and abuse of power.
However, putting these excesses into some sort of context is the Ryan Report, the result of nine years investigation into Ireland’s Darkest chapter; a national scandal, decades of unspeakable abuse of the vulnerable by those entrusted with their care. A tiny minority of monsters perhaps, but it went on for over sixty years in the full knowledge of the church authorities; the brutality, the ritual beatings, the systematic humiliation designed to make the children feel worthless. More than two thousand youngsters routinely molested and raped, often publicly flogged when they tried to escape or blow the whistle. And the same pattern emerges; abuse of power normalised by those in authority.
Add to this catalogue of suffering inflicted by an elite few, the almost total collapse of the world monetary system whose principle cause is – you’ve guessed it; greed and abuse of power – and it’s hard to be optimistic. What do you do when the great institutions of State let you down? What hope is there when dependent children are cruelly tortured by those who represent none other than God himself? Should we all trundle en mass to the top of Cave Hill and Lemming-like end it all?
Well, that’s one possible outcome, but maybe there’s another that’s worth a shot. The distilled wisdom of the ages fell from Jesus’ lips in his Sermon on the Mount. He talked about not storing up treasures on earth, he spoke about the darkness of the human heart; ‘…how great is that darkness!’ He told us we could not serve both God and money, and then he said something we need to hear right now. He said, ‘Don’t worry!’ and everybody says, ‘I can’t help it,’ and the reason why they can’t help it is they don’t listen to what he said next; ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness…’
What did he mean? To seek God’s kingdom means to live lives in accordance with his values, his way of doing things, lives of compassion and love, respecting the dignity of others while responding to their needs. However, the trick is this, while Jesus told his followers to ‘…go into all the world and preach the gospel’, he spoke never a word about regime change, and yet a dozen men changed the world forever as the velvet revolution took hold.
Remember the things we were taught in Sunday School? Salt of the earth? A light on a hill? Yeast in the dough? In the world but not of the world? That’s his way of doing things, and I’m naïve enough to believe that those methods still work. But we can do nothing without first changing the world between our ears, and that’s what the Sermon on the Mount is all about (Matthew 5–7).
What do you thimk? Visit my Blog>>> |
