Fr Paddy: Don’t judge others before you know them

A 24 year old boy looking out the train window shouted…
‘Dad, look the trees are going behind!’
Dad smiled and a young couple sitting nearby, looked at the 24 year old’s childish behaviour
with pity, suddenly he again exclaimed…
‘Dad, look the clouds are running with us!’
The couple couldn’t resist and said to the old man…
‘Why don’t you take your son to a good doctor?’
The old man smiled and said…’I did and we are just coming from the hospital, my son was
blind from birth, he just got his eyes today.’
Every single person on the planet has a story. Don’t judge people before you truly know
them. The truth might surprise you.”

Christianity is the only religion which worships the scapegoat, the one who is hated,
excluded, spat upon, blamed for everything, ridiculed, shamed, and made expendable.
Christianity is the only religion that focuses on imitating the victim and which sees God in the
one who is surrounded by the halo of hatred.

There are some important lessons to be learned from this, not the least of which has to do
with where we see truth, goodness, and God. We need, today, some correctives since we live
in a culture which, not unlike most cultures in the past, scapegoats some persons to the
benefit of others and then identifies God and holiness with those who have created the
scapegoats.

God is not to be confusedly identified with the myths of success, power, glamour, popularity.
Never confuse God – or what is holy – with current cultural religion, which, antithetical to
Christ, worships the included, the glamorous, the ones who aren’t shamed and ridiculed, and
the ones who seem important or indispensable. The God of our culture and the God that is
preached in so many of our churches is not the God who dies on a cross, is hated, spat upon,
and is excluded and scapegoated out of ignorance. No, our culture does not worship a
crucified God. The God Jesus revealed is still, in our very own culture, excluded, mocked,
scapegoated, made expendable, and often killed, mostly in the name of God and truth.

Where do we see this?
Our own culture, like every other culture past and present, creates a category of persons that
it deems expendable and then subsequently victimises through exclusion, ridicule,
scapegoating, and often through actual death. The ones who constitute that category shift
slightly from time to time, but there is always a common denominator: it includes always
those who are the weakest.

Thus, for instance, our culture marginalises and scapegoats the sick, the poor, the
handicapped, the unborn, unattractive, non-productive, and the aged. These we deem
expendable and subsequently take away full status within the human race. Worse still, we
identify God and holiness with those who are doing the excluding, as for instance the ruling
party. But this is antithetical to true religion – and true wisdom.

Where is God? God is on the side of the victim, standing with the one who is excluded, and
especially present in the one being ridiculed, and dying in the one who is being put to death.

True Christianity knows this. It worships the scapegoat – the one who is surrounded by the
halo of hatred. Populist mantras, such as “building walls” or deal or no deal….Brexit will
happen……. seriously challenges what true Christianity is about.

May values of tolerance, inclusion & compassion represent the Gospel message of love and
forgiveness.

SEE ALSO – Read more of Fr Paddy’s weekly columns here

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