Читать книгу Blessing the Curse? - Ksenija Magda - Страница 6

If we observe a problem long enough, we usually discover that we have only scratched its surface. For when we dive into the problem and begin to probe its depths, we discover a complex web of reciprocal relationships and complications. For instance, in Africa, on the surface, we see the problem of teenage mothers who are unable to cope with their children. We want to help them cope, and so we set up institutions, teach them parenting, maybe also how to sew. Then there is another child out of wedlock, another hardship or inability to move forward, and we begin to feel overwhelmed about how to help, or we feel unable to care.

Recently, a church group from the US complained that as an organization, the BWA Women’s Department has become too liberal and concerned with the social gospel, and that if the poor nations only accepted the preaching of the gospel, they would become as affluent “as we are in the US.” Regardless of where we are in the world, we all inherit shortcuts to doing away with the pain of the world. Some believe that life is simply difficult, and we need to endure it rather than change it; others believe that we have somehow earned the right to be better off than others. We inherit these traditions matter-of-factly and often unconsciously.

But rather than bowing to the imbalance and suffering of the world, activists and advocates stick out their necks for what does not make sense, believing that every person counts. Pure activism, however, is often counterproductive because it either grows out of the trauma and suffering of the activist, or it does not see the bigger picture. In this way, activism can be naïve and even abusive. For instance, as much as every single life matters in the atrocious business of human trafficking, the fact is that for every one person you save, two other people will likely get trafficked in their place. Thus activism can actually enhance suffering: the first victim may never return to “normal” life, and the two others have now been drawn into the same abyss. The more productive such an activist is in the business of saving one, the more successful the business of trafficking becomes. Thus the activist is up against intricate structures of evil that operate according to their own principles, and the only real cure is to stop the demand. But for that, something deeper must happen in the lives of the those who buy people for pleasure – and that cannot be solved by activism. We need a shift in paradigm: where there is no demand, there is no trafficking. This simple, complicated truth applies to all the suffering and oppression in the world.

To return to the African story of unwed mothers, the girls and their hormones do not drive teen pregnancies. Rather, a set of cultural and traditional structures of evil feed on the hormonal drive and are sustained and enforced by traditions, which are backed by cultural understandings of the divine. From an early age, girls learn that their sole purpose in life is to be wives and mothers. Many parents support this because they believe that this traditional role prepares their daughters for their futures both properly (in our case, biblically!) and practically. They do not stop to think about their daughter’s need for an education or independence, or the fact that her life and the lives of her offspring will depend on her ability to provide for them. Early on, while she is unable to think for herself, her culture makes that choice for her. School is expensive, and since girls will marry anyway, it is considered a financial loss.

So when the hormones hit, and tradition confirms that a girl is old enough to make her dreams and purpose come true, she will try and find herself a man. He, too, was trained by tradition – not to become a husband and a father, but to go places. His success is often determined by counting how many women he has had – even in the church, because when men are blessed, God gives them many women (like Abraham, Jacob, David, or even Solomon). I have been told all this by a girl from South Africa! Such narratives enforce the structures of evil, taking a good thing (such as a narrative approach to the Bible) within a vulnerable place (an illiterate environment) and abusing it.

In this recipe for disaster, a girl looks for a husband to marry and father her children, and a boy looks to have as many women as possible. She has not been taught about her sexuality, but when she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, everyone is surprised and angry. Tradition did not cover this part, except through strict prohibition, but she never expected to have her baby out of wedlock. From the girl’s perspective, she did what she was supposed to do to fulfil her purpose as soon as possible – and nobody told the boy about the children, or the cost and inconvenience of supporting them in a rundown economy where there is no work. So when his girl becomes demanding and wants a home and sacrifice, he moves on to a new woman. Without work or training, the girl is shamed and possibly abandoned by her family, and so her only chance to get food on the table comes from the pimps and traffickers – and the hope that she might find another man who will accept her. This girl is easy prey, and her scenario is just the tip of the iceberg, for it not only affects her life in the present, but also the lives of her children in the future – many of whom will be abandoned and end up roaming around the streets, trying to find a way to live.

This is but one story that depicts the mighty, seductive, and fatal structures around us. Such stories happen everywhere, luring people in, promising life, only to drag them down into deepening pain. The children come from the streets, broken families affected by AIDS and other illness, the trauma of war, physical abuse, constant poverty, and so on. Their lives have been so broken that it is difficult to know where to start the healing, and so the activist’s life becomes impossible.

Though these structures of sin are everywhere and work against everyone, Jesus came to break their power to enslave and to lead people to freedom. Jesus confronted evil in all its forms: he healed the sick physically, emotionally, spiritually, and socially. For when we are sick, our whole person suffers. If the body did not matter, Jesus would not have bothered to resurrect Lazarus. If the spirit was all that mattered, perhaps Lazarus would have been better off dead. But Jesus resurrected his body, because God’s creation matters to God.

As Christians, we are called to treat people in their entirety, just as Jesus did. This is what it means to proclaim the good news! Yet more often than not, the church fails to follow its master. In its teaching, it catapults faith into the spiritual realm, where it has nothing to do with real life. At the same time, the reading of Scripture has become influenced by the culture of the world rather than Christ. Instead of exposing and dealing with the sinful practices that the Bible clearly and systematically rejects, the church feels compelled to reflect and uphold the structures of sin because doing so makes its life in the world much easier.

When I teach a course on Revelation, I wonder what it was like for prophets such as John or Ezekiel, who were called to “swallow” the book of prophecy that God gave to them, which was both sweet and upsetting. God’s word brings liberation, but it does so within the structures of evil. We have to take the bad with the good to find the path towards freedom.

The UN claims that there are more slaves today than there have been at any time in history in spite of the fact that most countries have an antislavery act in their constitution. Having been banned to the dark side, slavery has assumed more subtle ways of existing, even within countries that are proud of their democratic heritage. The treacherous and concealing powers of enslavement encourage people to be content with things as they are – especially when the bad happens elsewhere – because, “I could be so much worse off.” The fact is, those of us who are living in “freedom” are just living on the upper levels of a hierarchical ladder, which is being upheld by hosts of exploited slaves elsewhere.

One of the upsides of globalization is that these intricate relationships become more openly visible when we try to live together and establish complex economical connections. Thus globalization has revealed that the systems from the past are defective, which, of course, is old news. Nevertheless, the nationalistic shift towards the right – what is known and traditional – attempts to split up the more unifying canopy of these global relationships and conceal these connections.

And yet revolutions are not the answer, as each revolution attacks problems partially, on the surface, without plumbing the depths in order to make thorough and lasting changes. We throw things up in the air only to realise that when they come tumbling down, they are assembled in exactly the same way. We all feel the curse, as if we are in a never-ending horror movie, and just as the credits come up, we begin to relax because we think the evil has finally been conquered, and then it pops up and glares at us from the trunk of the car as it drives into the sunset. Why do we always end up in the same enslaving structures? I believe that the path of liberation can only be recovered by reading Genesis 3 through the lens of Christ’s incarnation and redemption for the whole world.