Urbi et orbi – on Good Friday, Matthew and Peace

It is Good Friday today. I got up early, and now sit in my alcove overlooking Terenure’s Eaton Square. The park lies tranquil below my window; the only sounds come from my keyboard and a wood pigeon. Everyone else in the house and around the square is still asleep, it seems. At this moment my world is at peace.

Good Friday – the day that stands for the horrifying torture and suffering of man inflicted by man – will be observed in this catholic country with the appropriate solemnity: the pubs and restaurants are closed, the off-licences refuse to sell you booze – regardless of whether you are a Christian or not. Now in Ireland this day of abstinence triggers a remarkable run on the shops and offies on Maundy Thursday. The last supper is reinacted in packed pubs with Irish verve and gallons of Guinness. Good Friday is a public holiday sorely needed to straighten out all the hang-overs.

Instead of participating in the craic, we watched two documentaries last night: Robert Beckford’s “Who Wrote the Bible” and Richard Dawkins’ “The Virus of Faith”. The former features a Christian theologian who investigates the composition history of the book, while Dawkins in his typical confrontational manner interviews, or rather attempts to show up hard-liners and moderates of faith alike. The title is pretty self-explanatory. I learned nothing remarkably new from either documentary – except, perhaps, on the existence of “hell houses” in the US – another fundamentalist Christian aberration and hardly surprising, if very sad.

Robert Beckford approached the faithful in his program with academic results, textological facts, which hardly impress someone who has chosen God. I would have been interested in hearing what these same people had to say about the brutality not only within the text, but also by those who feel the scripture gives them the right to judge, persecute, torture, and kill others. I had hoped to hear them explain the bible as a book of love, of compassion and kindness. It would have been interesting to ask them whether the notorious intolerance inherent to their faith affects everyone who has ever lived on this planet and who never heard of Jahwe, Moses, Abraham, Christ, Mohammed or any other personage involved in the Judeo-Christian pantheon.

If so, then hell must be a very busy place. Perhaps it has tiers, just as Dante suggested, and on the uppermost level, “barely hell” so to speak, Plato and Aristotle converse with Shakiamuni, Ghandi, and Zoroaster, while Lao Tze and Confucius are contemplating a pot of tea that Madame Blavatsky brews for everyone. An infernal academy catering to all those who have curiosity, or just simple got the raw Judeo-Christian deal of having missed the message, or simply having had the misfortune of entering this world before the desert tribes of the Arabian Peninsula came up with the idea of the one God. Wait, no. I forgot: the world is just a few thousand years old. Of course.

As I watched, I thought of Leo Tolstoy, who searched the highs and lows of his own soul for a spiritual answer to the old question of “what is the purpose of life”. Eventually, he suggested sticking to the Sermon on the Mount, that fabulous composition in Matthew. If the Christian world could accomplish just living by this text alone, we would, so Tolstoy, have no major problems. He was excommunicated for that stance.

I believe Tolstoy was on to something. If you believe in Christ, then nothing should be wrong with the Sermon on the Mount. That includes Matthew 5:29: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.” Yes, if you believe, then go all the way. This religion is not known for moderation or tolerance: you either believe, or you don’t – either the bible is the word of God, or it is not. Therefore, to me, the calls for moderation and views that Jesus used hyperbole really do not convince. If you begin to pick and choose which passages to take literally and which to attribute to rhetorical devices, you may as well accept the whole work as a piece of fiction. Think of Matthew 6.24, for example: “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money.” This to me is one of the most important passages of the sermon, and so very crucial for our times. And how much better would mankind be off, if those who act in the name of God, would live by this one sentence alone? For example, you would not have Haliburton, big ranches in Texas, or a lucrative English real-estate portfolio to the name of Blair. Which brings me to a weakness in “The Virus of Faith”: I did not understand why the otherwise sharp and aggressive Dawkins failed to point out to the fundamentalist preacher and Bush-adviser Richard Land, that it does not become a man of the Christian faith to show off his gold jewelry and Rolex watch, whilst preaching Christian righteousness. Why does the man dress like a golden calf instead of giving away his possessions and helping the needy? Isn’t that what the story about the rich man, the camel and the eye of a needle was all about? Or was that a literary device, too?

Then there is the eschatological view espoused, for example, by Dostoevsky in the Brothers K. It is a fine product of 19^th century thought, fueled by a dread of growing decadence and rumors that God is dead. This view has compassion for fallen man, who has sunk so low that he no longer can reach the ideal set forth in the sermon. While pessimistic, it is a kind, compassionate way of looking at man and cutting his hopeless, erring Christian soul some slack. But it also underlines the principal weakness of the entire belief-system: According to this view, the principles laid down in the sermon of the mount are unattainable. They will only come about and be lived by in the Kingdom of Heaven, and that as we know will manifest at some uncertain point in the future. This is precisely what bothers me most about this entire Christian religious undertaking: the convenient deferment to the next life, the speculation on eternity, and on that which will commence only once the lights go out for us in this world.

Peace cannot be something to hope for after death. Peace would be timely to have now, in this world, not just for an initiated part of humanity, or for humanity even, but for all sentient beings. But the Richard Lands, the Bushs and Bin Ladens of our sad times know no tolerance or, it seems, kindness and forgiving. What I saw in both documentaries proved that these men are not in their positions of power by chance. There are legions of faithfuls that refuse to contemplate and question their religious self-righteousness and instead propel their inflexible and limited ways. This pertains not only to the hideous lack of acceptance for other faiths, but affects most painfully the incredibly small-minded attitude the three monotheistic traditions have towards each other. And so we still look at the countless images of the figure of a man on the cross, two thousand years after his passion and we still have not learned to draw the ultimate lesson out of his self-sacrifice: that what was inflicted on him was wrong, that no-one should suffer like this, regardless of his or her faith and that he of all people would have wanted us to see this.