Reflections of Faith and Justice - a Devotional by Benjamin Maysනියැදිය

One of the great difficulties of life is to avoid extremes. Professor H. Y. Britan of Bates College used to say in his philosophy classes, “Truth is seldom if ever found in extremes.” We need to avoid the extremes in religion. We run the risk constantly of making our religion either com pletely God centered or entirely man centered.

When we make it completely God centered, we commit the fatal blunder of trying to establish connection between ourselves and God without due regard to our neighbor. We seem to think that we can shut our closet door, pray, and make everything right with God, then in our daily lives cheat, hate, exploit, and even kill. If our religion becomes too God centered, it is likely to become highly otherworldly, a religion whereby we seek mainly to save ourselves from a burning hell or to win a place of heavenly rest after this earthly life has ended. History is full of examples of this kind of religion where the church puts on revivals, calls “sinners” to repentance and seeks to save their souls while the great social evils—poverty, unemployment, slavery, disease, crime, war, racial discrimination, political and economic injustice—go untouched and unchallenged. . . .

When our religion becomes wholly man centered, we risk committing the unpardonable sin of making man into a god. We are likely to ignore the existence of the God in whom Jesus believed and the God whom the Christian is supposed to worship. We may deny purpose in the universe, finding it nowhere except in man. The completely man-centered religion is likely to lead man to believe that he is self-sufficient and that he can lift himself entirely by his own bootstraps. His ethics may become a man-centered ethics with no reference beyond itself. Such a religion is self-defeating because man ends up by worshiping himself and glorifying humanity. The completely man-centered religion leads one to believe that social reform is enough, that personal or group worship is unnecessary, and that no time is needed for spiritual growth.

At this point Jesus was never misled. More God-conscious than any other personality known to history, he combined in his person, life, and religion the perfect relationship between himself and God and between him self and man. The religion of Jesus might be thought of as a triangular religion, and an equilateral triangle at that. The three sides of the triangle for Jesus were God, man, and himself. This was, and still is, a delicate relationship—so delicate that in every move the whole triangle is involved. When for Jesus the God side of the triangle touched upon the self side, the man side of the triangle was automatically involved.

In the sixth chapter of Matthew, where Jesus is teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, he takes it for granted that men are going to forgive one another if they want and expect God to forgive them: “ ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.’ ” Following the prayer, Jesus states clearly that forgiveness on God’s part is granted on condition that we ourselves forgive others: “ ‘For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ ” In this connection there is hardly any doubting the fact that man’s good relationship to God is definitely dependent upon and conditioned by man’s good relationship to man.

In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, the question of forgiveness is carried still further. There Jesus is trying to show that in good religion one does not seek revenge and that the only thing that breaks the vicious circle of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is forgiveness. He teaches in this chapter that whenever any person trespasses against you, the thing to do is to “ ‘go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.’ ”

In this connection Jesus goes even further. When Peter asked, “ ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’ ” Scholars agree on the interpretation of this pas sage. Jesus is saying that we are not to keep books on the number of times we have been wronged by another, but that the process of forgiveness is to go on indefinitely. We are not to count the times we forgive. There is no limit to what the religious man must do to perfect reconciliation or right relationship with his fellow man.

Jesus cast aside the old idea that neighbors are to be loved and enemies are to be hated, insisting that enemies are to be loved because such is the will of God. The triangular relationship includes not only man, his neighbor, and God, but man, his enemy, and God. “ ‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ ” The reason given is “ ‘that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust’ ” Matthew 5:43-45.

- Excerpt from “Seeking to be Christian in Race Relations” by Benjamin E. Mays, Chapter 4