Woe To…

Consider – Lindsey Clancy cannot be convicted – Christa Pike cannot be properly executed – and yet in Canada a woman that simply regrets being unable, due to her advanced years, to prepare holidays meals for her entire clan is approved for “euthanasia.”  Having written that extended, multi-clause sentence, I sit and stare trying to find the words that best communicate how heinous and perverse our moral understandings have become.

When the prophet Isaiah wrote:

Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil;
Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness;
Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes
And clever in their own sight!

I wonder if he understood that such would literally be true someday.  I first encountered that bit of scripture in my teens – over 50 years ago – and until recently I thought Isaiah was engaging in metaphor and perhaps hyperbole.  But here we are where so many people think the inability to convict an admitted child killer is good – where so many claim it is “justice” that a woman that tortured another woman to death survived an execution attempt – and yet it is the formal policy of a national healthcare system that a woman who should be honored for her years of faithful service to her family should be, in essence, executed because she can no longer provide that service.  Quite literally evil is called good and darkness is substituted for light.

What’s interesting is that Isaiah passes the same woe to, “ those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight!”  And so we learn where this perverse and heinous thinking has come from.  We have rejected centuries, millenniums even, of moral standards because we somehow think we are smarter than history.

It has been argued to the point of cliché that religion is simply a construct made by men to enforce some common moral code.  As evidence, it is presented that so many religions share similar moral codes, completely ignoring the counter-argument made by the Apostle Paul in Romans 1 – an argument that amounts to the idea of natural law.  And yet here we are in this self-proclaimed enlightened age, having jettisoned religion, thinking natural law sufficient, turning even natural law on its head.

It is time we faced facts – facts completely evident if we will but look – we don’t make “mistakes” – we don’t just “screw-up” – we are capable of the most heinous of evils save for being constrained by outside forces of some sort.  Moral codes, education, religion, legal systems – all of it and so much more are not merely conveniences constructed to order our lives.  They are necessary to keep the monsters within each of us at bay – monsters looking for the smallest crack from which to send forth their monstrosity.  Some let the monster fly, and so Christa Pike bludgeons a classmate to death after carving a pentagram into her chest.  In others the monstrosity leaks out in small bits and simply rejoices that the Pike monster still lives.

Christianity is unique; however.  Christianity seeks not merely to tame and constrain the monster.  It promises to destroy the monster, and remake us into the good people we so mistakenly think ourselves to be.  But that path is not the easy path too many churches pretend it to be.  Following Christ fully and completely is hard and occasionally painful.  But it is the only way the monster can be destroyed.  That destruction is more urgent than ever.