ALL OF YOU ARE EQUAL AS BROTHERS AND SISTERS

by Adam Harbinson

I said something on radio recently that I hoped the presenter would edit out – but he didn’t. However, as I thought about it later I was glad he didn’t. It was to the effect that if religion were to be exposed to the white heat of the truth of Scripture, the entire edifice would collapse in one unholy mess.

I momentarily regretted saying it because it came across as harsh and judgemental, and I didn’t mean to sound like that. But I take nothing back, for history demonstrates that religion more often than not does more harm than good. Think of the Crusades of a millennium ago, the Middle East of today, or the Suicide Bombers in Iraq – all deeply rooted in religious mindsets that believe, ‘Everybody’s out of step but me!’ Even the crucifixion of Jesus was masterminded by religious people.

I’ll shed no tears if I wake some morning to a world without religion, although the downside is that humanity would be overwhelmed by hopelessness and despair, because most of us have been duped into believing that you can’t have peace with God without religion – a monstrous lie!

So you won’t find me in church too often these days, for a number of reasons. Firstly I rarely want to go. Secondly, I don’t see the need to. Thirdly, there’s nothing in the Bible that tells me I must. And fourthly I see lots of things in the church that Jesus expressly told us to steer clear of.

For example, I’ve been to many services when ministers were being installed in their new churches, and I’ve always been a little bemused at the proceedings; men dressed in frills and robes and silver buckles and clerical collars, each vying with the others as they parade their lofty titles.

What do you think Jesus makes of it all; the irrelevant circus, men honouring each other in their pious bubbles as their brothers are slaughtered in the streets in a fight for religious freedom half a world away?  

Despite their preening and prancing, he loves them, but he didn’t miss and hit the wall as he voiced his opinion of them. He said, ‘They love to sit at the head table at banquets and in the seats of honour in the churches. They love to receive respectful greetings as they walk in the marketplaces, and to be called teacher. Don’t let anyone call you teacher, for you have only one Teacher, the Christ, and all of you are equal as brothers and sisters. And don’t address anyone here on earth as ‘Father,’ for only God in heaven is your spiritual Father’– how on earth do modern Pharisees dodge broadsides like that?

‘But you need teaching!’ howl the evangelicals. O really? Well, try this one for size: ‘I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbour, or a man his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.’

It’s my belief that while we sometimes think, ‘If I had lived when Christ was on earth I wouldn’t have rejected him,’ the fact is, the religious mind is as opposed to Jesus now as it ever was. To quote Matthew Henry, a respected non-conformist minister of the seventeenth century, ‘Christ in his Spirit, in his word, and by his ministers, is still no better treated. By a thousand devices they make religion give way to their worldly interests.’

Things don’t change much, do they?