Moses returned to the LORD and said, “O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why you sent me? – Exodus 5:22

Today’s Scripture Reading (May 24, 2012): Exodus 5

While we proclaim a message of peace and believe deeply in it, Christianity and Judaism have never fared well in the midst of it. The pattern that history has repeatedly shown to us is that we are easily co-opted into the dominant societal pattern – we tend to begin to look like the culture in which we live. Whether it is in a time of universal tranquility, or simply a time in which we understand what is expected of us, when we find ourselves in those moments we stop struggling against the restraints and we just accept what is.

Karl Marx has often been paraphrased as saying that “religion is the opiate of the masses.” The full quote is that “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Marx’s point was that religion was created by man as a way of dealing with suffering. It gave us a way of dealing with the pain of life – it became a replacement for the heart in a world that does not have a heart and a soul in an existence that is without a soul. Marx’s belief was that if we could just get rid of religion, then we would begin to finally strain against the bonds that hold us captive.

But Marx was wrong. It is the culture itself that drugs us. The opiate of the masses is nothing more than a constant expectation placed on us by our society. And it is religion that constantly asks us to go beyond.

Israel had grown accustomed to life as slaves. The dream of something different had stopped. They were content just to exist and live. God knew that. He had heard the prayers of the people, but he knew that they were not in a position where they would be willing to make the effort needed to change their world. And so God sent Moses, and things got worse. But their belief in God would be the catalyst that would drive them toward something that was better. Rather than God simply being a belief in something that would come after this world, it became the belief that this world could be changed for the better.

For the Christian, if we are following Christ than we are being driven away from the status quo of this world and toward a world that only God could imagine. And what our detractors often miss is that the love that we are instructed to show has nothing to do with suffering through this world so that we can exist somewhere else. It is our revolutionary weapon of change and the more trouble that arises, the more we love and the world changes before us.

   

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Exodus 6