When I look at the world around me

I sometimes wonder what it must be like to grow up in a country other than South Africa. Our sense of what is “normal”, the things that no longer trigger full-blown hysteria - even one episode of Carte Blanche would surely dissolve a “normal” person in tears. It’s a testimony to a very dark reality. I’m confronted with it almost daily in my teaching profession – stories of colleagues and bits and pieces of the township life filter through to me through the kids that I teach, the dad that gets shot in the front yard, the uncle stabbed in the shebeen.  The bubble of my false illusions gets constantly and unceremoniously burst. I sincerely hope that there are still normal places in the world. Places where a person can raise their kids and still cling to a bit of faith in the society which they bring their children into. Places where my hand won’t instinctively shoot up to the lock on the door when my car pulls to a halt at the traffic light. But you see, even if I found a place where I could safely turn on the evening news, I wouldn’t go there. I wouldn’t seek asylum in a peaceful place because I believe that I have found the cure for the broken society which I live in.

No, I’m not talking about the historic rise of the ‘Obama from Soweto’. I would like to still think that there could be a political remedy for the deep, festering wounds in our nation but I let go of that hope quite awhile back. Don’t get me wrong, I would still love to see more wise and magnanimous leaders like Mandela; men who have effected massive change in our nation. But somehow I don’t think even the old Madiba magic could save us now. I think secretly many of us believe that if our police services worked like the team from CSI and our legal system like the one in Law and Order we would finally have all the bad guys locked up in the tronk and we could sleep safely in our beds at night. How quickly we forget that not so long ago we lived in a police state. Our legal system was littered with more laws than we knew what to do with and army patrols made regular beats through our most populated residential settlements.

No. Laws and police batons can never keep the peace in our restless and violent hearts. Whether they be South African hearts or any other nationality, they will never succeed. How can I be so sure? Well, where can we find details of the first recorded incident of murder known to mankind? It wasn’t a revenge killing in Manenberg or xhenopobic violence in Gauteng. It was the jealous rage of a young man called Cain from Canaan which resulted in the premature death of his brother Abel. It is recorded just after the paragraph describing how his parents overturned the natural order of things and rebelled against God. Soon after replacing God in heaven with the far inferior god of Self a very different kind of society was spawned, the kind of dark new normal that we recognize in our own homely land.

When I look at the world around me the first question I ask is – What is wrong with us? Why do we insist on destroying what would otherwise be a perfect paradise?! At the end of almost every awe-inspiring account of the wonders of our beautiful blue and green planet, Attenborough will usually conclude by reprimanding us for the destructive habits of the humans who live on it who are exploiting and threatening the very existence of the environment we live in. His world view is very different to mine but the question is still the same. I believe this question is so fundamental that it begs a rigorous accounting in any philosophical attempt to explain this life. Surely I can’t be the only one that is left outrageously unsatisfied by any religion or system of belief that glibly passes over this question. And yet I find that quite a number of the most popular ones do. Let me describe two of them to illustrate.

Take Islam for starters. Muslims celebrate the institution of a kind of new and improved system of laws which followed the heels of the Mosaic system of the Jews. It is their ardent belief that the plethora of laws presented in their religion along with the severe penalties threatened for the law-breakers will restore a golden age of peace and good will in society. At the risk of sounding like an old-fashioned nay-sayer, I think the hype is massively overstated. It fails to correctly diagnose the fundamental human problem. Adam and Eve had only one religious law to keep – don’t eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The threatened penalty for this transgression was of the severest kind – death, and they still went on to break it! When the Mosaic Law came later with the founding of Judaism proper, a staggering 613 laws took the place of the first. Muslims trumpet the dismal failure of the Jewish nation to consistently adhere to those laws as though their failure necessitated a new system of laws to replace the old and a new religion to go with it. The system of laws introduced by Islam is more comprehensive than that of the Mosaic Law but when was the problem ever that there were too few laws? The insurmountable problem for us humans has always been that we seem incapable of keeping laws, even good ones. Humans seem to be deeply averse to laws of any kind, most especially those announced with divine injunction.

And what about the secular humanist approach espoused by the Atheists? How do they treat the “What is wrong with us?” question? Well according to this view we as humans are merely sophisticated animals. We shouldn’t be surprised when animals kill each other, when they do cruel things motivated by greed, they are only demonstrating what they really are on the inside. So why are we? - Surprised by the cruelty of humans toward each other? We still bear the moral fingerprints of a righteousness God on our souls. We call it “conscience”. It is the moral compass that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Unfortunately the “ghost within the machine” is completely discounted by the secular humanist world-view and they contribute to the deadening of our moral conscience by denying its existence.

 If the solution is not more rules, more police, more religion or more brainwashing in “tolerance” towards our fellow human beings (after all, what do animals know about tolerance?), then what in heavens name is it?! Well it is only too obvious that our help is not going to come from anyone born after that first man called Adam. Every person after him has only confirmed the embarrassing truth that moral perfection is a noble dream but tantalizingly out of reach for any human hand to grasp. When we fail we feel so bitterly disappointed so we remind ourselves that we are only human after all, and at least I’m not as bad as Mugabe.

Moral perfection is God’s domain, so God did something beautiful. Seeing the conundrum that we’re in, God took pity on us, left his throne and was born as a man. Someone approached him with a question, and began his question like this, “Good teacher…” But Jesus wouldn’t let him finish, “Who is good but God alone?” He replied. “Good teacher” would never do as a title for the God-man. He was perfectly good because He was born of God, not because he was another human with some wise words to share with the world.

We inherit our moral deficient natures from our great grandfather – Adam, but not since the God-man has there ever been this profound new way to be rid of our moral dis-ease. “You must be born again” the God-man said, not born after our imperfect ancestors but born of the same divine spirit that the God-man had. What a mercy! What a gift!

In a country that was once called a miracle I hear white people constantly complaining about how much the country has changed. In the other room I hear black people bemoaning how little has changed after 10 years of true democracy. But in my heart I know there is only one way that our country will truly change for the good. It is by faith in the only man that ever was good, the God-man Jesus. I know the gospel message works because it’s working in me. I became a part of the solution as soon as the God-man took a hold of me. I’m not yet who He said I can be but I know one thing's for sure, I’m surely not the man I used to be. I pray that one day when I look at the world around me it will finally be the kind of place that God intended for it to be.