It’s worth reminding ourselves from time to time that the people who really made Jesus the most angry were the religious people of His day. The low-life prostitutes and the sleazy tax collectors who colluded with the Romans profoundly disappointed Him, but He nevertheless had boundless compassion for them. The people who really angered Him were the self-righteous religious people, the scribes and the Pharisees, who went around telling everyone how righteous they were and dispensing unasked-for religious advice to everyone they met.
In many ways, we Americans have become the Pharisees of our modern world. If Jesus were to return today, I believe that He would take the United States to task for our endless penchant for self-righteousness and for judging everyone else.
Consider, for example, the absolutely deplorable spectacle of Rep. Peter King and his hearings on Muslim extremism. As an American, I’m profoundly embarrassed. What a distasteful and dangerous and divisive exercise in self-righteousness!
I am reminded of Jesus’ well-known teaching in Matthew 7:3: “Why do
you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” A old folk saying makes the same essential point: whenever we point a finger, we have three fingers pointing back at us.
In Rep. King’s exercise in self-righteousness as he fishes around looking for trouble in the Muslim community, he is ignoring the provocative actions of our own country which further add to the pool of anger in the Muslim world – our tacit support for Israel’s continued theft of Palestinian land, the historic tragedy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, our continued decade-long occupation and bleeding of Afghanistan, our support for Mubarak and other unpopular tyrants in the Arab world, our tacit support for Israel’s illegal occupation of Syria’s Golan Heights – the list goes on and on. How about Rep. King holds a hearing on these issues?
From a Christian point of view, self-righteousness and its close partner
judgementalism are wrong primarily because making judgments is ultimately God’s job, not ours. But self-righteousness and judgementalism are also wrong because we so often make the wrong judgments.
Take U.S. judgments in past decades as they relate to the extraordinary recent developments in the Middle East. It turns out that so many of the guys we were told were good guys were actually the bad guys, the despots and the torturers who pulled out your finger nails. And many of them were hoarders, keeping for themselves a vastly disproportionate share of their country’s wealth.
And at the same time, while we’re doing a comprehensive re-valuation of our country’s stance to the region, we should ask ourselves, Is it possible that some of the countries which our country has placed on the “bad guy” list might have some significant good in them?
Take Syria, for example, a country which I’ve visited numerous times and
in which I have a number of friends. Have we noticed the significant fact that while most of the countries in the Middle East are swirling with protests and “days of rage,” Syria continues peacefully on with an apparently contented population? And meanwhile Syria hosts some one million refugees from the Iraq war we started, this despite the fact that Syria is coping with sanctions imposed on it by the U.S..
I think it’s time someone said a good word about Syria. More about that in a future blog.
For Christians, Lent is a time of spiritual self-inventory. There is much
that is good about America, much to celebrate in our country, but our excessive self-righteousness is not one of those things. In fact, it’s one of our worst traits. This Lent, let’s give it up.
