When I asked my son’s lawyer why the Oklahoma lawmakers “bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne” on registered sex offenders, he told me it was because we are “the buckle on the Bible belt.” This only added to my grief.
I once was proud of that title (the operative word being “proud”). I thought that it meant Christians in Oklahoma knew the scriptures inside and out, followed the example of Our Lord, and were more loving and caring than others; but even before my son’s trouble I came to realize that was not the case. Though we may read our Bibles and attend our churches, for many of us the love of Christ is lacking. Not to say we do not love, we do, but only if the person is worthy.
What could be farther from what Jesus taught? He was called a friend of sinners. He said we were to love our neighbors as ourselves, even if that neighbor was a despised Samaritan. He came as a physician for the sick, not the well.
His harshest rebukes were for the most dedicated, God fearing people of that day. Their whole lives revolved around keeping the Law and worship. They avoided the slightest hint of sin. Even their name means “separated ones”. Yet Jesus called them “whited sepulchers” and “a generation of vipers”, said their father was the devil. Why? Because their’s was a religion of judgment. They kept the rules and all those who did not were accursed of God. Perfect people have no tolerance for the imperfect. Self-righteous leaves no room for love.
But none of us are without sin. Yehiel Dinur, a survivor of Auschwitz, had that lesson brought home to him when he walked into a Nuremburg courtroom and faced the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann. The experience caused him to faint in the witness box, and not, as he later explained, because of loathing or remembered atrocities. It was because he saw a man, just a man, and not a devil. He saw what most of us close our eyes to, that within himself, within all of us, is the capability to do great evil.
