Thursday, October 19, 2017

Hesitations

Here is a quick note on certain things that may make us hesitate going full speed ahead with our Christian living.
1. There is the hesitation to be true and moral. There is a limit to what we would like to do. Morality sets a limit. Morality means that I am not the only person in this house room community, society. we need to limit our tendency to be "too full of myself". There are other people with their own feelings plans thoughts, pains and joys. To neglect that fact is to be full of myself, that it is always about me. My true self is discovered when I live in respect and reverence towards others and myself.
2. There is the hesitation to be challenged--to pick up the cross. In a world of injustice we cannot be lukewarm. We need to work for justice. We need to suffer! No we do not look for suffering. We suffer because we promote life--we promote human dignity we promote the fact that we are God's image. Christ came to show us fully this reality of being image of God. Christ came to promote the Kingdom--and he was willing to suffer for it by refusing to bow down to the rejection against the Kingdom. Our hesitation can be observed in our taking distance from acts that directly violate our humanity. We fear challenging that violation. We then flow with the trend.
3. There is the hesitation to accept that Christ is the unique mediator of redemption and salvation. We respect other traditions but we might go to the point of refusing to acknowledge our own tradition. We then dislocate Christ--and the Trinity--from the center in order to accommodate other traditions. Yet we dare not become members of other traditions. Let us put it this way. We met God in his revelation in Christ. This is how we knew God. Can we not be faithful to what this revelation has given us? If we want other people of other religions to be true to their beliefs and practices can we not require this of ourselves? If we want dialogue to be true and sincere, let us be who we really are: we are Christians and Christ is our one and only mediator.
4. There is the hesitation to condemn sin as if it does not exist. Sin is our refusal to be true to who God wants us to be. Hence it also involves our refusal to connect with God. We do this in our strength and with our strength. Today we might want to shift the axis and say that the problem is with our psychological weaknesses or socio-cultural backgrounds. But there is sin and darkness. The option to reject our humanity is so overwhelmingly present. Are we hesitating to call dehumanisation a sin?

There are random ideas that I reflect on now.