Zechariah 9:9-10; Romans 8:9, 11-13; Matthew 11:25-30
The New age of the sons and daughters of God: Living according to the Spirit
If the twentieth century was considered the age of war and man’s inhumanity to man, what adjective shall we find to qualify the twenty-first century, the age of Islamic jihadism? The wars fought for natural and Human Resources, the quest for colonization and military superiority conquest, left many casualties behind and the scars of those wars linger on today. But what do we say about the rise of Al Qaeda, ISIL, Al-Shabaab, Boko-Haram, and others plunging this new century deeper into darker years of killings and insecurity? What shall we call our age?
Undoubtedly, the twentieth century was a century of technological break throughs, the age of the declaration of Human Rights, the overturn of John Crowe, the civil liberty movements, but also the age of genetic engineering, contraception, Roe versus wade and the independence of many African countries from their former European colonial masters. This picture is incomplete without the mention of the media and transportation revolutions. Yet, it was still the age of human decadence with the killings and massacres of that century. Yes, it was the century of wars and man’s inhumanity to man. But what shall we call our century, the twenty-first century?
Many years ago, the prophet Zachariah prophesied a war-free world, even before the advent of Christianity and Islam, yet that peace still eludes us; wars and rumors of wars surround us; religious exploitation and political intrigues; economic strangulations and moral bankruptcy; in fact, it is the collapse of humanity that we are witnessing. But what happened to Zachariah’s prophecy – was it a lie? The prophet spoke of a new king and kingdom, but we now have democracies and liberal governments: did he not foresee that? We can count the number of monarchies or rudiments of monarchies around the world. Surely the age of monarchies is gone, with no visible hope of its return. The age of humility and riding on a donkey, of which Zachariah speaks, is far gone, except for remote countrysides where poverty still reigns supreme. So, what shall we call our own age?
The reign of liberal democracy is the end both of virtues and God. The singular lesson from the first reading of today, the prophecy of Zachariah, is in the meaning of the Prophet’s name – remembrance of God. Liberal democracy has no place for God, it suffers from amnesia en route to Alzheimer’s. In a democracy, ethics is human fabrication, human consensus, and it is as ephemeral and transient as the humans that decide on them. Oh yes, that is our age, that is the twenty-first century – moral-free age, and the God-less and God-free age. True, it is useless to remember, because there is nothing to remember because there is only the future created by our votes and electioneering.
Not too quickly though! Every human being is a matter, which has weight and occupies space. At least, this shows us that we are, to a significant degree, what we eat. If we are what we eat, our yesterdays matter as much as our today, because the food of yesterday built the body of today. If the physical food of yesterday nourishes the physical body of today, we need the spirit or oxygen to keep this physical body from disintegrating and decomposing. It follows that the physical is not the only part of us that is essential, the spiritual or metaphysical is also important. To the degree that this idea of what happened yesterday on our menu is important, to that degree do we begin to appreciate memory and the past, no matter how myopic and short our memory is.
If what we ate yesterday goes into what bodies we have today, we can push the logic even beyond the food of yesterday to something more primordial – our birthdays. None of us fell out of the blues, we came from parents, other human beings like ourselves. This simply means that no matter how oblivious of the past we want to be, our human DNAs go beyond ourselves and point to a past of which we are constitutive. And, the good news is, every DNA has God as its author – there is no avoiding God in human life.
If the prophet Zachariah summons us to the memory and remembrance of God, it is only with God that our problems of ceaseless wars and irreligiosity will be assuaged. It is by looking backwards to where we came from, that we can ascertain where we went wrong. If the future appears bleak, it is high time we looked to the Lord of the future for solutions. No wonder Jesus invites us in today’s gospel to come to him. “Come to me,” is an invitation to remember how Jesus took care of the needs of people in the past as a guarantee that he can take care of our own needs today. “Come to me,” speaks a spiritual language; it says that the physical is not all there is about life. “Come to me” is the recognition that lasting solutions are divine solutions and not human solutions. If God created everything that there is, he alone can fix everything in creation, including human beings.
The invitation of Jesus Christ is in relief with Paul’s teaching that reliance on the physical is catastrophic because the physical is temporary, but the spiritual is everlasting. Human flesh, on account of which we toil and moil, will surely perish. No wonder we keep celebrating funerals, despite the medical longevity our medical sciences guarantee. According to Paul, it is the spiritual that guarantees immortality. So, we do not live to eat, but eat to live. And when we eat to live, we shall still die because the physical body is temporary. However, if we want to be immortal, then we need to restore morality into human equation of living. Our immortality is tied to our ethical lives. Immortality is the fact that we stop living and allow Jesus to live in us. When Jesus lives in us, and since Jesus is immortal, then, we too become immortal.
Now we can answer the question of what age is ourselves – our is the age of immortality; ours is the age of the spirit. To be alive is to be spiritual. To be dead is to be fleshy, a mere assemblage of matter, which has weight and occupies space. To be a Christian is to live the life of Jesus Christ. To belong to the twentieth century is to cue one’s life on Jesus’, a lifestyle with 2000 years of records, a lifestyle begun by Jesus Christ himself. Yes, we live in the new life of the sons and daughters of God, we live the life of the Holy Spirit, in imitation of Jesus Christ.
When our world celebrates obesity and wasteful spending and living, while millions go hungry or live on the verge of starvation, what legacy are we living for our children to imitate, what examples are we living behind? When our churches are empty and our pews deserted, can we blame our children for joining radical and fundamentalist groups, since nature abhors vacuums? When every little time we have is spent on social media, alcoholism and the quest to be high, what time do we spend with our children? When our parents took us to church every Sunday as children, spent time with us on the farm, teach us the values of family life and sharing, the meaning of sacrifice and the joy of love and peace, why can’t we give that much back to our children too?
Assignment of the Week:
Share you experiences of childhood Christianity and morality with someone who has stopped going to church.