God’s Democracy Convention Sunday: Choose God over All Else!
Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Ephesians 5:21-32; John 6:60-69
For those who still believe in God and find the time to gather/assemble as a Church, every Sunday is God’s Democracy Convention Day. Every assembly convoked in God’s name, as Joshua did in our first reading, where two or three are gathered in God’s name, it is God’s convention/assembly moment! It is an opportunity to choose God over everything else: “. . . choose today whom you will serve . . . as for me and my household, we shall serve the Lord,” says God’s candidate, Joshua!
If we believe that every human being has the right to choose how he or she should be governed, and we call that democracy, God’s democracy predates our democracies – whether liberal, constitutional, monarchical, name it! Human democracy is an after the fact democracy. It is after our ancestors had been created and sustained by God, and we have been born and nourished that our democracies begin. We begin to choose what lies ahead of us while forgetting where we came from. It is a democracy of the future without a past. Otherwise, how could one choose pro-choice or abortion rights without sending to jail one’s parents and ancestors who refused to abort us in the womb? Where will abortion rights come from if its claimants themselves had been aborted? A people that forgets its past is doomed!
God’s democracy starts from welfare; that’s the argument of Joshua. God creates and nourishes prior to asking for recognition or election! God offers his creatures a right either to choose him or to rebel against him. The recognition of the welfare received or the love and care lavished on his creatures is all that God’s democracy asks for. The logic is simple: if you did not create yourself, if you do not sustain your own life (food sustains the body NOT life) but owe it to God, could you admit that much by choosing/electing God as your leader? This is God’s democracy; the referendum and convention where God canvasses for human allegiance or the election of God as the leader of his creatures.
God’s democracy of welfare took up a human face in Jesus Christ, who revamped God’s democracy by offering himself up as a holocaust – he was hanged upon the cross of calvary for the salvation of the world. Our second reading argues that love is the foundation of God’s democracy. It calls everyone to look back to the sacrificial life of Jesus Christ as a springboard to launch into an ethical life. This is God’s fundamental ethics – love: instead of a pro-choice mission, God chooses a pro-life propaganda: “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” Marriage is the new theater for the replication of Jesus Christ’s holocaustic life because Paul says: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her.” The choice to be married, for a Christian, is to choose martyrdom and be freely offered up as holocaust like Jesus Christ: it is neither the right to your body or your life that matters, but the other’s because Jesus Christ died for others and not for himself!
Come to think of it, Jesus Christ doesn’t apologize for his invitation to us to join in his democracy of martyrdom; you are either in or out. If Jesus Christ were desperate about having human votes or selfish disciples, he would not have said to the few who stayed behind: “Do you also want to leave?” It not about “crowd size,” but all about becoming like Jesus Christ choosing God and his will above all else! As a matter of fact, no one does God a favor by accepting God’s leadership: Hell fire is spacious enough to accommodate all generations of rebels! The good news is that every generation has its own pro-lifers. Like St. Peter, they say to God: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68-69).
Like a woman who accepts God’s will by subordination and a man who is ordered to practice holocaustic love, whether you are a democrat or a republican conservative in earthly democracy, without choosing God as your ultimate leader, you pave your way with good intentions to Hell!
God’s democracy Sunday is an invitation to choose wisely or choose God above all else. Remember whose welfare keeps you alive. Recall the helplessness of all democracies against coronavirus and the God who alone can preserve life even during a pandemic! you know what? We shall over mpox too!