Amandla! Thy Kingdon Come
“Your Kingdom come, Your will be done On earth, as it is in heaven.”
So we pray every day. The Basileia, the Kingdom of God, is to be built on earth, here where we are, where you sit right now. Yet not just where you are and I am, but everywhere — where farmers plough, where shopkeepers sell, where miners dig, where steelworkers sweat, where governments decide, where armies march, where security police torture, and where rapists and murderers sit in a lonely cell, hated by the world.
In all such places the Basileia is not; but one day it will be (as it is in heaven). Where do we find the Kingdom, then, and how do we recognize it?
Jesus taught us to include the Kingdom in our prayer. In so doing he commissioned us, as Christians, to play whatever part we are able in the struggle of its building. In the Basileia, God is King, and in Him communities are guided by love and understanding of each other; violence, evil and repression are banished for ever.
It is therefore hardly surprising that in today’s world we find the church in the forefront of the struggle against evil. Take South Africa, for instance.
South Africa is just one place where people live amid fear, violence, repression and servitude. South Africa is interesting, however, in that in many ways it represents a microcosm of today’s world. South Africa is dominated politically, economically and militarily by a small minority of rich, white people, mostly men. These people claim to espouse democracy and justice, yet they build their society on exploitation, breaking families and violently denying freedom to the vast majority of their fellow human beings. This majority is for the most part not white, is poor, and is a good 50 percent female.
Particularly interesting is that in South Africa we can also see clearly the struggle to overcome this evil, to reject oppression, and the refusal to submit to violence and wickedness. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa represents the struggle against oppression throughout the ‘Third World’ (a horrid phrase!), oppression imposed by the ‘First World’ (a stupid phrase!). South Africa is a model of the world, and there opulence, oppressor, competition and greed exist in such close proximity to poverty, the oppressed, co-operation and concern, that the evil is plain and self-evident for all but the most blinkered and deluded.
The struggle against apartheid is in many ways the oppressed world showing the western world the path it will one day have to follow. The western world, obsessed with the ‘creation’ of wealth, the convenience-orientated lifestyle, with comfort and ease, has lost sight of who Jesus is and why He has come. Jesus came to renew the hope and self-respect of those whom society uses. Jesus reaffirms that they are not alone, that their situation is wrong, that in the Kingdom to come the suffering imposed by some people on others will stop.
And Jesus came to save sinners. Yet that we are saved does not give us ‘carte blanche’ to sin as we please, but puts us under an obligation to recognize our sin and repent. It is important, then, that we identify our sin. To inflict suffering and hardship upon others because of our greed, by whatever means, be it on a personal level, or as part of larger scale economic and/or political processes, has to be recognized by Christians in the western world as a sin. In God’s Kingdom we will not oppress, and the building of the Kingdom is one of our primary tasks as Christians.
Just because those that we in the west oppress are out of our sight, we cannot allow ourselves to put them out of mind. In South Africa it is much harder to put the oppressed out of sight — they have to be banished into ‘homelands’, forced to live in squalid townships, and expected to quietly ‘develop separately’ without impinging upon white South Africa’s sense of dignity. So the focus of our sin becomes that much more acute when it is apartheid (separateness), for we compound our sin by trying to separate it from our conciousness.
The Churches in South Africa are committed to the overthrow of apartheid — even the Dutch Reformed Church has abandoned any attempt theologically to justify apartheid. Apartheid is evil, it cannot be reformed; it must be destroyed as a political, economic and enforced social system. We too have to commit ourselves with oppressed South Africans to the struggle for the Kingdom, wherever we may find the struggle.
Contemplate the words of Desmond Tutu:
“I am puzzled about which Bible people are reading when they suggest religion and politics don’t mix.”
The Bible teaches about the ‘Kingdom of God’, and the struggle against apartheid is part of the struggle to build the Kingdom. The Basileia is the Christian goal, and those who undermine the struggle need to ask themselves whose interests they are serving. A great deal of suffering is caused by Britain, politically and economically. Our elected leaders are, intentionally or not, the major international support of the wickedness that is apartheid. It is incumbent upon us to protest at what is being done in our name, to take our heads out of the sand and reverse our political and economic roles. Economically we can personally refuse to play a part in oppression, and politically we can tell our leaders to do the same. As Desmond Tutu has proclaimed, we cannot duck out of these issues by reason of our Christianity. It is precisely because we are Christians that we should confront such issues and build the Kingdom.