Evil in God's Name

December 3, 2023  

         Beginning of Year B:  Introduction

One of the outcomes of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) is that there was a conscious attempt to help Catholics, who were not used to reading the Bible regularly, to get an overview of the entire Bible through their attendance at Sunday Mass.  So Mass was allowed in the local language, and Catholics who attended Sunday Mass regularly would be familiarized with the entire history of salvation as expressed in the Bible over three years of the Liturgical Cycle. Each liturgical year starts with the first Sunday of Advent and ends with the Feast of Christ the King. From this First Sunday in Advent we are entering YEAR B. This overview of the history of salvation was planned by assigning selected passages spread throughout the Bible. The Gospel readings in Year A would mostly be from Mathew, those in Year B would mostly be from Mark, and those in Year C would be from Luke.  The first readings on Sundays would be mostly from the Old Testament, and in many cases  have some thematic connection with the corresponding Gospel reading.  The second reading is independent of the other two and is taken from the non-Gospel parts of the New Testament (i.e.. Acts of the Apostles, Letters and the Book of Revelation).  John’s Gospel has no year assigned to it,  but since Mark’s Gospel is the shortest, many of the passages from the fourth Gospel are inserted during the Markan year (Year B). In addition there is a heavy use of John’s Gospel in Advent, Lent, Easter Week, and during the post-Easter season till Pentecost. After Pentecost, the Gospel readings continue from the Gospel chosen for that year (A, B or C) till the feast of Christ the King when the Liturgical year ends.

Today’s first reading refers to prophecies or sayings of Isaiah that took place around the time that the Jews were captured and taken to Babylon, from where Cyrus the Great, one of the most enlightened Kings of Persia and one who was reputedly very sympathetic to the various beliefs of his subjects (like Akbar the Great in India), allowed the Jews to return and re-build their temple. But though the Jews praised Cyrus as God’s anointed one for doing this for them, they still needed to explain to themselves their own experience of being repeatedly conquered, enslaved, and often being deported from what they were taught to believe was the land promised to them by God. And Isaiah, in today’s first reading, interprets this experience of theirs, of being repeatedly conquered and banished from their promised land, as inevitable because they were not faithful to Yahweh.  This was the same reasoning that was pushed by the Zionist movement that struggled to get the land now known as Israel. To them, it was only just that they get that land, because Yahweh had promised it to them.

Such religious interpretations - and these are found in many religious groups - allow the concerned religious group to feel highly justified in oppressing, unleashing much violence and committing many atrocities on, the ‘enemy’.  In fact in the Jewish case we have the additional religious command of  ‘herem’  (found in the Old Testament and the Jewish Scriptures) which gave Joshua and his army the religious permission , and even duty, to kill all those who have been“doomed by the Lord to destruction” (Joshua 6:17).  Under this religious command Joshua’s army kills not only combatants, but “all the men and women, young and old, and ox and sheep and donkey” (Joshua 6:21) of the conquered land. 

Putting aside these religious beliefs, what was the human story?  The human story, at least according to the Jewish scriptures, is that the Jews were outsiders to the land of Canaan (today’s Israel and Palestine taken together), for their ancestor Abraham came from the land of UR (Genesis 12) which was in Mesapotamia, a land close to today’s Syria. After just two generations in Canaan (i.e. at the time of Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, later called Israel), they voluntarily went away and stayed in Egypt for many generations, and eventually came back and conquered Canaan.  However, while living in this land that they conquered, they go through cycles of being themselves conquered, enslaved, often being deported, and then coming back to this land, until they were finally conquered by the Romans in 63 BC. A century later, i.e. in 66 AD, the Jews (led by those like the zealots and others who expected a political messiah) rebel against the Romans, who then suppress that insurrection by eventually destroying their temple in 70 AD, - and the Jews scatter throughout the world. Finally, in the 20th century, by a political decision, advocated strongly by the Zionist movement, the collective guilt felt for what happened during the Holocaust, and perhaps even because the “Christian’ nations also bought into the promised land belief as it is found in the Bible, the Allies (and the United Nations which were controlled by the Allies), choose to carve out a part of the land that was by then known as Palestine, to give the Jews a homeland that was henceforth called Israel.   

One could certainly ask whether what was really behind the above mentioned events of Jewish history were not religious, but economic and political realities?  For example, even according to the Bible story, the Jews go to Egypt for economic reasons, i.e. they were starving in Canaan (Genesis 42).  And their being made slaves in Egypt  was for political and economic reasons, because the Egyptians (sons of the soil) felt these foreigners were taking away their wealth and jobs (not unlike the anger that was stoked among the ‘sons of the soil’ in Mumbai against those who came from the south and the north of India, or against the Mexicans in the USA). Then the  Jews, in their effort to escape, wander around looking for a place to settle down, and they finally find a land which, unlike the desert in which they had spent 40 years, seemed to be an inhabitable/cultivable land, and also one which they estimated, with their desert hardened strength and skills, they could conquer. So they attack and take control.  

But whatever the real reasons, or combination of reasons, the ones that appeal most strongly are religious (or ideological) reasons, because they speak to the heart and give a non-selfish justification to whatever evil one does, so that the individual can see one’s own terrible acts (raping, cutting out babies from wombs, torturing, etc) as only answering to a higher calling.

Christians, too, have used religious justifications to oppress the Jews, especially from the year 380 AD, when the Emperor Theodosius 1 declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire.  However, when the same Emperor tried to acknowledge the civil rights of Jews, the famous bishop St. Ambrose forced him to backtrack, based on the religious justification that the Jews had killed Jesus and their descendants had not repudiated that act.  This ‘religiously’ justified antisemitism continued after the fall of the Roman Empire and led to centuries of oppression of the Jews - through forced conversions of Jews, making them second-class citizens by taking away many of their civic rights, and violent pogroms targeting them  - all of which reached its most horrible expression in the Holocaust, which was carried out by a Christian Germany in the 20th century.

Aside from the Jews and the Christians, such religious interpretations and justifications are also found in other parts of the world. In India, the religious claim to a particular part of the city of Ayodhya by Hindu fundamentalist groups was made on the grounds that a Muslim mosque built over there was built over the remnants of the birthplace of Ram, who is believed to be an avatar of Vishnu, one of the triune Godhead of Hinduism.  A lot of blood was shed in the communal violence that was subsequently unleashed, often supported by religious as well as the law and order authorities, and eventually in what many consider a politically appeasing judgement, the Supreme Court of India granted the Hindutva groups that particular piece of land and the mosque was torn down.  After the success of this effort, the same Hindutva groups are now trying to claim other pieces of land in other parts of the country based on similar religious claims. Strangely, these Hindutva groups refuse to apply the same principle to the Hindu places of worship that were put up over religious shrines of other groups.  For instance we have records of the tearing down by Hindu Kings of Buddhist stupas and even the cutting down of  the Bodhi tree where the Buddha was said to have gained enlightenment and the taking over of places of worship of the adivasis (indigenous peoples) of India.  Again the spectre of Islam-based terrorism is another historical reality that we have experienced in today’s world.  Or again, Afghanistan, currently ruled by the Taliban, uses its own understanding of Islam to deny the human rights of the women who live there.    

Actually, this kind of denial of basic human rights using a religious justification is similar to what is done in the name of other allegedly ‘secular’ ideologies like nationalism, capitalism, communism, and others - for they all give a justification to their blind adherents/followers to do much evil in order to further what that particular ideology declares as a good. To take just a few, there are the atrocities carried out by the Khmer Rouge and Stalin in their pursuit of their communist agenda, or the mayhem, suffering and poverty unleashed in many African nations by Western nations (led by the CIA) which orchestrated  the assassination of  at least six African independence leaders including Patrice Lumumba of Congo, primarily because these new leaders were not expected to support the Western driven capitalistc system, the horrors of the slave trade fostered by colonialism, or the horrors of jingoistic nationalism of Hitler’s Germany, and so on and so forth. In all these cases human beings can allow/forgive/justify themselves for doing what they themselves perceive as inhuman, because they can use these justifications to convince themselves that what they do is in service of  a greater ideology, religious or otherwise.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has declared that “everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion… and to manifest his religion or belief” But what if two belief systems strongly clash - do we then defend our belief system even if it leads to situations of injustice and oppression of those we disagree with.

Today, as we enter the season of Advent that prepares us for the feast of the birth of Jesus, it might be good to remember that Jesus repeatedly taught that religious practices/ beliefs/rituals are always subservient to human care and concerns. One of Tony D’Mello’s story in his book, The Song of the Bird, is quite apt over here: 

A proposal was made at the United Nations that the scriptures of every religion be revised; everything that leads to intolerance and cruelty should be deleted; everything that damages the dignity of human beings should be destroyed. When it was found that the author of the proposal was Jesus Christ, reporters rushed to his residence.  His explanation was simple: Scripture, like the Sabbath, is for human beings, not human beings for Scripture.

And that is the final and only criterion to judge whether a religious belief (or any other ideological belief) is to be followed, namely whether that belief/practice/ritual leads us to build a more humane world.  That is not the same as saying that one must always choose peace above justice, because for Christians at least, action for justice is  essential to being Christian (Synod of Justice, 1970), - though even then we must  remember to work for it keeping the human dignity of the ‘enemy’ in mind. For a Christian, at least, if this criterion of Jesus is valid, then much of what we human beings have done, and continue to do, in the name of religion, ought to be roundly and completely condemned.  

But, going beyond such condemnation , if such blind belief in any ideology, religious or otherwise, is at the root of such  great evil, then before we point fingers at others, let us ask ourselves, whether we nurture this same monster within our own hearts, when we tell ourselves or our children to believe blindly in our own religion? And should we also consider that if religious teachers foster such a ‘blind faith’ in religion, that they too are contributing to this evil - whether this is done in catechism classes, in seminaries, in courses of theology for the laity, or in Sunday sermons and the like.  If so, I would suggest that the following words of Jesus are fully applicable to such religious teachers or even ourselves who foster such a ‘blind faith’:  “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to sin, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. (Mathew 18:6)

First Reading: Isaiah 63: 16b-17, 19b; 64: 2-7

 

For you are our father,  though Abraham does not know us and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our father; our Redeemer from of old is your name. Why, O Lord, do you let us stray from your ways and let our heart harden, so that we do not fear you?  Turn back for the sake of your servants, the tribes that are your heritage. We have long been like those whom you do not rule, like those not called by your name. When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down; the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard,  no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you, who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who gladly do right,  those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned;   because you hid yourself we transgressed. We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.  We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name or attempts to take hold of you,  for you have hidden your face from us  and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

 

Second Reading: First Corinthians 1: 3-9

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

Gospel: Mark 13: 33-37

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.’