Prepared for the Ahmadiyya Muslim
Youth Association
Interfaith Seminar in Fergus
(2007)
In 2007, the Ahmadiyya Muslim
Youth Association asked me to participate in an
interfaith seminar in Fergus.The chosen topic was
“religion and social peace.” The “seminar” turned out to
be a two-person speaking event: their speaker and me.
(They told me that a presenter from the Jewish community
could not attend.
The Ahmadiyya movement began in
the late 19th century.
Its founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, claimed to be the
returning messiah. Muslims believe that Jesus (not
Muhammad) will come at the end of time, and Ahmad
claimed to fulfill that promise. He also taught that
God’s revelation continued after the Qur’an. For these
reason, other Muslims have rejected the Ahmadiyya
movement as heretical. In some places, particularly
Pakistan and Bangladesh, they have faced persecution.
Of further interest to
Christians, Ahmadiyya
Muslims believe that Jesus was crucified. (Mainstream
Islam teaches that Jesus was replaced on the cross by
someone else, perhaps Judas.) Ahmadiyya Islam says Jesus
was taken from the cross before dying and revived in the
tomb. Later he moved to Kashmir where he died at an old
age and was buried under another name in a tomb there.
About 20,000 Ahmadiyya Muslims
live in Canada. Their national organization is led from
a mosque in Maple, near Toronto. While small in numbers,
they are active in efforts to spread their beliefs.
These interfaith seminars are part of this effort.
Nonetheless, I was glad to participate, as an
opportunity to share the good news of Jesus.
Here the text of the presentation
I gave, in a slightly modified form.
Let me start by thanking the
Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Association for hosting this
event. It is a great opportunity to get to know each
other a bit and learn from each other, and I feel
privileged to be part of it.
You asked me to speak from a
Christian perspective. In a sense I have been a
Christian since childhood. Yet it was while at
university that I gained a much fuller understanding of
Jesus and, really, a love for him. I heard his call to
follow him, to entrust my life into his
hands. With God’s help, I am learning to do this.
I
I am supposed to say something about “Religion
and Social Peace” from
my perspective as a follower of Jesus. However, I’m
going to start with what I’m not going
to say.
I’m not going to say that religion
promotes social peace.
One of the alternative topics for
tonight was “Is
Religion Dead?” With
the recent onslaught of books denouncing religious
belief and trumpeting the truths of atheism, you’d think
religion is terminally ill. Actually, the opposite is
true. Religion is thriving!
These books are a reaction to the
ongoing vitality of religious belief around the world.
These critics are not saying religion is dead. Rather,
they are saying that it should be. Their soundest
argument points to what we are talking about tonight.
Religion, they say, does not promote social peace. The
opposite! Religion causes great social harm.
It is hard to argue with them. My
father-in-law spent much of his childhood in Northern
Ireland where religious beliefs murderously divided
people. We marked the Holocaust a couple weeks ago, and
I remember that Jews were slandered from Christian
pulpits and burned in the shadow of Christian
cathedrals. You in the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community have
suffered persecution at the hands of other Muslims.
Does religion promote social peace? I
have to agree with religion’s critics: it does not.
However, many of our atheist critics
seem less able to see the carnage caused in the name of
irreligion. Our last century saw millions die, driven to
the slaughter by ideologies that sought to wipe out
religion? Does atheism promote social peace any more
than religion? No. It seems the problem is deeper than
either religion or atheism. There is some darkness in
the human soul that can harness either religious belief
or unbelief to evil purposes. No matter what our
beliefs, we all face the same question: how do we deal
with this darkness?
So I will not argue that religion
promotes social peace.
II
Nor will I argue that Jesus
promotes social peace.
The Hebrew prophet named Jeremiah
lived about six centuries before Jesus. He heard the
powerful of his day proclaiming peace. Their cries of
“Peace! Peace!” carpeted the streets. A society may be
stable, with no visible conflict and everyone “getting
along.” It may look peaceful. Yet when he lifted and
looked under the rug, what Jeremiah saw was far from
peace.[1]
I once heard a Latin American
theologian talking about this sort of peace. “What is
the most peaceful place in any town?” he asked. The
cemetery! All is quiet. No conflict. No strife. And no
life! Jesus came to give us life, abundant life. He will
not settle for cemetery peace.
The problem is, when he brought this
sort of life into dead places, he caused social
disruption. Living
out the heart of God, he gave himself to the wrong sort
of people: people who were poor, people who were
diseased, women who were devalued, sinners who were
outcast. He touched the impure, and made them clean. He
released the condemned, forgiving their sins.
The problem is, only God can forgive
our sins. Jesus was putting himself in God’s place. Do
you think doing that brought social peace? He was
accused of blasphemy. Jesus was not killed for singing
hymns too loudly!
His early followers were persecuted
for upsetting the imperial order. When you treat slaves
as equals, when you break down barriers of race and
class, are your promoting social peace? When early
feminists, motivated by their love of Jesus, called for
a new place in society for women, were they promoting
social peace? When followers of Jesus boycotted buses,
and sat in at lunch counters, and rode for freedom, were
they promoting social peace?
You see, Jesus wants more than
“social peace.” He wants – to use the Hebrew word – shalom.
In Arabic, salam.
More than just the
absence of conflict – an absence which can mask
oppression – shalom peace
is where people are whole, and wounds are healed, and
justice is done and lived. Peace is where enemies are
reconciled. Peace is where life, God’s gift of life,
flourishes.
Jesus is not interested in anything
less than that.
III
How do we get there?
Jesus told a story about a man
travelling by foot down a winding and dangerous road.
Bandits attacked him. They robbed him of his baggage,
stripped away his clothes, and stole away most of his
life. He was left lying there, deeply wounded.
Along came a professional religious
person (in our tradition we might call him a minister).
He saw the man, yet for whatever reason – and he might
have had good reasons; most of us do – he did not help
but hurried on his way. Along came a religious leader
(in our tradition we might call him an elder). He too
saw the wounded man, yet for whatever reason – and he
might have had good reasons; most of us do – he did not
help but hurried on his way.
Along came a . . . Samaritan.
Among Jesus’ people, Samaritans were
despised. They
were Jews who, generations before, had sold out to their
enemies. Other Jews considered them heretics, impure,
troublemakers. Yet this Samaritan is the one who stoped
to help the wounded man, a man who is his enemy. Jesus
cast a Samaritan as the hero in the story.
You see, someone had asked Jesus, Who
is my neighbour? Who must I be neighbourly to? Who must
I love? In
response, Jesus told that story, with a Samaritan – and
we can plug in the name of whoever we happen to hate – a
Samaritan showing us how to be neighbourly.
Another time Jesus put it straight
out there. He said, “You
have heard the saying, Love your neighbour and hate your
enemy.” Even
if you haven’t heard the saying, it is common sense. Oh,
how Jesus messes with our common sense. “I
say to you, love your enemies. Pray for those who
persecute you.”
Jesus was talking to people who knew
about enemies. His was a subject nation, under the boot
of the Roman empire. Occupied territory! With
state-sanctioned theft and torture, and a countryside
littered with crosses used to execute troublemakers.
Against that backdrop, he said: “Love
your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.”
This gives us a glimpse
into Jesus’ strange way to peace.
IV
Love our enemies? How on earth do we
live that? Should we even try?
Miroslav Volf is a Christian
theologian from Croatia, in what was Yugoslavia. He was
speaking about forgiveness. It was 1993. Someone asked
him, “But
can you embrace a chetnik?”
(They were the Serbian death police who were ravaging
his people.) He
took a long time to answer. “No,
I cannot – but as a follower of Christ I think I should
be able to.”
How? Why? For Miroslav Volf, and for
me too as a follower of Jesus, embrace is a metaphor for
opening ourselves to someone who has wronged us, even
grievously. It is us releasing the wrong they have done
to us. It is not necessarily forgetting the wrong –
often we should remember, at least for now – but it is
allowing space for something else to exist between us
instead of the wrong.
Forgiveness is not fair, because it
benefits the wrongdoer. When it comes to peace, though,
maybe this unfair forgiveness is our only hope. I am
struck by how Volf puts it:“The injustice of
oppression must be fought with the creative ‘injustice’
of forgiveness, not with the aping injustice of
revenge.” History
is full of people committing murder in the name of
justice. We keep adding poisoned water to that deep well
we’ve been drinking from. Forgiveness lets us stop
drinking the poison.
Of course, the wrongdoer has a part
too. To them belongs the hard job of repentance, of
turning away from their path of wrongdoing, and trying
to repair in costly ways the damage they have done. With
repentance and forgiveness, reconciliation can happen. Forgiveness
and repentance leading to reconciliation is, I think,
our only hope of true peace.
Only enemies can make peace. Jesus
says, “Love
your enemy.” Without
forgiveness, can that happen?
How can
we possibly do this? I am not very good at it. I come
back to that darkness in my soul. It is painted with a
lifetime of doing wrong to others, and others doing
wrong to me. Its windows are blackened with habits of
hatred, and indifference, and especially fear. All those
different ways I have tried to shut God out. In the
dark, I am lost.
Jesus is the light who has come into
this dark world, and who wants to come into those dark
places in our souls. To heal the wounds. To forgive the
sins. To lift the pain. To squeeze out fear, with the
growing power of hope and trust.
In his life, his death by
crucifixion, his resurrection to new life, and his
presence with us now, he has done what I cannot do. He
has made peace with God possible. I was God’s enemy.
Jesus, in whom is the fullness of God, loved me. He
loved his enemy. He forgave me, a costly thing. And he
reconciled me to God.
Walking with Jesus – allowing him to
work on me, change me, renovate my soul – is the only
way I have any hope of loving my enemies, of living
peace. Walking
with Jesus is the way to shalom peace,
a true and just peace that brings enemies together.
