The Bad News and The Good News

The bad news is that time and again we fail to do the good that we want to do and do the bad things that we do not want to do. This is the natural state of our human condition. We are sinners and it is only natural that sinners sin! We have no true health and no true justice because the noble professions of medicine and law are no longer a calling but good vocations to earn good money.

The bad news is that money has become the god of our modern society. The love of money is the root of all evil. It is therefore no surprise that the world is in a mess and full of misery.  We humans have messed up and contaminated God’s wonderful and beautiful world with our greed, lust, pride and selfishness. In 1973, E. F. Schumacher in his book, "Small Is Beautiful" reminded us that the meaning of democracy, freedom, human dignity, standard of living, self-realization, and fulfillment is not a matter of goods but people. Hence economic thinking must "get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capital/output ratio, input-output analysis, labor mobility and capital accumulation” in order to "make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness and spiritual death.” Otherwise, he recommended, "let us scrap economics and start afresh."

The Good News is that where sin abounds, God’s grace abounds even more. The season of Lent is a time to reflect on the meaning of the suffering of Jesus Christ on the Cross. The cross, as Timothy Keller rightly pointed out, reveals the systems of the world to be corrupt – serving power and oppression instead of justice and truth. Jesus’ death on the cross was to show us not only “bankruptcy of the world” but to reveal the wonder and power of God’s love to break the power of the fear of death over us so that we can live a life of love and not a life of fear.

The Good News is that Jesus died on the cross so that we too can die to our false identities based on our performance and achievements. Timothy Keller makes the very important observation that Jesus is not a King on a throne to whom we have to submit out of fear or guilt. Jesus is a King on the Cross to whom we want to submit out of our love and trust. Jesus’ command for us to take up our cross is not a commandment to endure our pain and suffering in life but to “die to self-determination, die to control of our own life, die to using him for our agenda,”

Jesus died and rose from the dead so that the Holy Spirit will empower us to live our true identity as a child of God in an intimate relationship with our Loving Heavenly Father. As we pray, Our Father who is in Heaven, let us direct our wills to hallow His Name. Let us remember that we are the ambassadors of God’s Kingdom here on earth. God has given us His Holy Spirit but we need to let the Holy Spirit have control of us so that God’s perfect Will will be done on earth as it is in heaven through our lives.