The Least; the Last and the Lost

 

My 84-year-old mother-in-law is a devout Catholic and as a result, I’ve had to spend most of my Sunday’s taking her to mass every Sunday evening at Novena Church. Although I am not Catholic (I am a Buddhist student of Christian Theology who has inevitably been blessed by Muslims, Jains and Hindus) I listen in and take in what’s being said. Today’s priest came up with what I thought was a valuable soundbite, which everyone seems to forget.

The service was about the “end of times,” or Judgement Day when Christ returns to judge humanity and the righteous are supposed to be resurrected. The priest made the valuable point that judgement day is not about a check list of how many commandments you broke and kept but about how you treated people, specifically the least, the last and the lost.

What made this resonate with me, is the fact that it seemed to touch on who Christ is and for that matter the Christian and just about every other religion. Read the Gospels and you will notice that Christ is a champion of the downtrodden. He is the ultimate rebel who showed up the respected members of society like the scribes and the pharisees for being hypocrites of the worst sort and offered to solace to the downtrodden like the fishermen, the tax collectors and prostitutes. The man wasn’t interested in collecting money from his followers but told the rich to sell all their possessions to become followers of his. Christ is the first God in human history who made suffering part of the ultimate divine glory:

 

 The King of Kings Showed us that Salvation was in Suffering and Sacrifice

I bring up this beautiful sound bite of the Least; the Last and the Lost because too many people get carried away with what I believe is the “wrong” thing (which I am aware makes me sound as dogmatic as the people I’m slagging off). Too many people get carried away with what I would call the “magic” of religion. Its as if you religion is a bargain where you pray to this or that God in the hope that by doing a certain number of prayers you will get health, wealth and happiness.

Now, I’m not denying the presence and probability of divine miracles. What I am saying is that the miracles are not actually the important part of the faith. Faith, as the Dalai Lama once said, should make you, “A better person.”

I think of the time I went to meet a Rinpoche in the airport. The man had a small entourage who had organized his trip to Singapore. The coffee session was very enlightening. The entourage had plenty of stories about all sorts of monasteries where there were monks who could do all sorts of miraculous things because they meditated on this way or that for decades of their lives and thus achieved so much merit.

Whilst these guys had plenty to say, the Rinpoche (who is supposed to be a living reincarnation who remembers his last life like it was yesterday) sat there looking rather bemused and whenever someone asked him about the magic, promptly said he didn’t know anything.

Now, this is a harmless story about people being focused on the wrong thing. It’s funny and cute in a certain way. What is not funny is when the focus on the magic becomes public policy and it comes a tool of oppression against the very people that just about every religion claim to champion. Think of India, which is officially secular but contains most of the world’s Hindus. Whilst the concept of “Untouchability” has long been abolished in the Indian constitution and legal system, you still get a large segment of the population getting the s**t kicked out of them because someone many thousands of years ago considered them unclean. Economic reforms have been doing their work in uplifting people beyond cast beliefs but its not happening fast enough.

Then, there’s the proverbial Holy Land to the Abrahamic Faiths. Three religions call this spot of the desert Holy and yet a host of very Unholy Things keep happening there in the name of the one God that all three religions claim as theirs.

If you leave you the main protagonist of this conflict (namely the Israeli Government and Hamas), you’ll find that the single worst group of people in keeping things in the Holy Land anything but Holy, you’ll find that they are inevitably the Zionist Christians. This refers to the group of Churches that believe that Christ will come again when the Israelis controls all the land. This is a group that has tremendous wealth and power or at least enough power to remind American politicians of both parties about which side they need to support. Hence, whenever a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians breaks out, you’ll find the most powerful man in the world doing what the Prime Minister of a strip of desert tells him to do.

Again, I don’t want to disparage belief in prophecy and whilst my study of theology is rather rusty, I don’t see how supporting a government that has on record killed 0.5 percent of a population of a territory (as reported by the Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/ ) could be an act of Holiness.

Let’s remember, the Gospels are very clear. Jesus was on the side of the least; the last and the lost. As horrific as the October 7 attacks against Israel are, indiscriminate bombing of people who are the definition of the least; the last and the lost and calling it self-defense if not something Jesus would condone. If anything, the Zionist Churches who are actively supporting the bombings need to ask if getting Jesus to return is in their interest at all.