There are reports that a convoy is heading to Queen’s Park, which brings to mind that despicable “Freedom Convoy” that disrupted life in Ottawa in recent memory, fueled and supported by conservative politicians, right-wing pundits and visionaries, and an alliance of churches. I think I have the nail for the vampire’s coffin. All those politicians who see people as nothing but workers are neo-slave masters, squeezing the blood from people to fuel the appetite of the rich and influential. Convoy solutions smell and sound bad; they cannot be mistaken for progressive and caring policies.

Say it isn’t so

4) Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, and which has been withheld by you, cries out against you; and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. 5) You have lived luxuriously on the earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.” (James 5:4-5, NASB)

People in the grip of the love of money will keep pretending that they are doing themselves and a society a favour. Wealthy people have never saved the world and never will, even though individuals like Bill Gates and more than a few other philanthropists have staked out a place in the history books. Governments and political parties who declare themselves on the side of the rich and influential will never be credited for raising all the people out of poverty. They do not have the conscience or common sense. All they can see is a con. Conservatives fail to win elections and all they do is deconstruct the sitting government into a den of thieves and and plot the end of parliament and fresh elections. Cons, convoys, and competition kill.

Whatever became of answers like, “Yes” to the question “Are you an incorrigible liar?” If you think that your obedience to a set of regulations and your observation of a festival or holy day put you above the class of sinners you will have no short answers, for the simple reason that you need to tell five or six stories to be transparent.

But let your statement be, ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘No, no’; anything beyond these is of evil. (Matthew 5:37, NASB)

One of the most absurd sayings that’s been circulating now for practically centuries is the idea of how much God loves people or how much Jesus loves the sinner, to be specific.  Have you recently asked a Christian to love a sinner and observed his or her response?  The primary tenet of Christianity the recognition that God is love.  How then can we repeatedly talk about how much God loves? Can God love a little or a lot?  Then there is the lunatic fringe insisting that love for God, already acknowledged as a smokescreen when people do not love their neighbours, is exemplified by unwavering obedience to elementary principles of biological life and by an obsession with holy things.  When all the religious people abandon everything but philanthropy we will be closer to recognizing that God’s love is immeasurable and accessible to few individuals.

Explanation, exhortation and experience do not always fall neatly into place. The priests of ancient Israel were perhaps the most affected by the hiding of the Messianic kingdom. The prophets were in a different predicament; they wrote about the Messianic Kingdom without knowing how or when its details would play. We can forgive those who sought to know the timing of the greatest mystery, but the ridicule and catastrophe that comes from posing as experts of the prophetic panorama is deserved.

There was a wisdom beyond the powerbrokers

Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature; a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are passing away; but we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory; the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood; for if they had understood it they would not have crucified the Lord of glory;

1 Corinthians 2:6-8, NASB

No second or third thoughts

The rulers of the age in which Paul lived did not know God’s mystery. Neither the Roman authorities nor the Jewish administrators of religious life seems to have had second or third thoughts about trying to respond to Yeshua of Nazareth with homicide. They thought nothing of killing him. He was just another troublesome Galilean. The Romans thought that by sacking the temple they would remove any Jewish resistance to Roman rule. The Jewish people on the other hand thought that by killing Yeshua they could remove the revolutionary uprising that Yeshua’s followers presented. Both the Romans and the Jewish people were doomed to lose against two permanent unchangeables: the son of David and the city Jerusalem.

“‘But to his son I will give one tribe, that My servant David may have a lamp always before Me in Jerusalem, the city where I have chosen for Myself to put My name.”

1 Kings 11:36, NASB

“then there will come in through the gates of this city kings and princes sitting on the throne of David, riding in chariots and on horses, they and their princes, the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and this city will be inhabited forever.”

Jeremiah 17:25, NASB

Faith’s mystery comes down to the matter of residence, first the residence of God among humans, God being one of us, and, second, the residents of God’s people in Jerusalem as a permanent feature. Neither mosque nor Solomonic temple are divine priorities. Faith in the prophets does not ideally end with a prophet, but with God himself intimately connected with individual human beings.