What's wrong with the world?

G. K. Chesterton was the author of the Father Brown novels featuring a priest who turns his hand to detective work. There is an unsubstantiated anecdote about Chesterton which goes like this. He wrote a letter to one of the London-based daily newspapers that read, ‘Dear Sir, in response to your article “What’s wrong with the world?”, I am. Yours faithfully, G. K. Chesterton’.

An insightful observation is it not? We know that we ourselves are not perfect and would not dream of making the claim of Muhammad Ali, ‘I am the greatest!’. However, if we are pressed to consider the implications of this admission in the light of God our judge, we will soon start justifying ourselves with statements such as ‘I am not as bad as so and so’ or ‘I do this or that decent thing’. Surely, we reason, if there is a God who brings people into judgement, then he is only on the case of the really bad guys such as the men who murder people like Jo Cox MP, the Parisian police couple or the dozens in the Orlando nightclub etc.

I can understand this line of thinking especially as I am aware of my own reaction to the sentence handed down by a Berlin judge recently. Here, I was taken aback to hear that a 94-year-old wheelchair-bound Reinhold Hanning was sentenced to 5 years in jail (almost certainly a life sentence), for being an SS guard at Auschwitz. He was a relative nobody in the mass of crimes committed at that place. There was no accusation of him committing violence but nevertheless, he was there - a small cog in a large wheel. Yet, what else could the judge do? The man had participated in things that should not have been done and failed to do the things that he should have. That is just like me, on a different scale, yes, but I think, say and do things that I ought not, and I fail to do all of the good that I should. Hence the Bible’s assertion that each person living has a flawed human nature.

So, ‘What’s wrong with the world?’ I am, and there is a price to pay according to Jesus. He does not say this in order to frighten us. As a truthful physician, he diagnoses our problem in order that we might take the cure. That cure is his forgiveness which he offers to each of us irrespective of what we have or have not done.

#judgement #humannature #forgiveness