Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Salt purifies. It preserves. When Jesus said that Christians should be the salt of the Earth, He meant that Christians should be a cleansing influence on the societies in which we live.
This effect is much more a matter of deeds than of words. The testimony that bears truest witness to the Christian message is in how we Christians live our own lives. Christianity’s greatest appeal is the observable changes that the Gospels have wrought in the lives of real people whom potential converts know.
Consider Peter, who denied Christ three times on the night of his capture and trial. Just over thirty years later, he demanded to be crucified inverted when he was condemned for being the Christians’ leader after Nero’s Roman fire. Peter is only one example among many of Christian belief transforming cowardice into heroic martyrdom.
Whole classes of human beings were transformed by Christianity from being disposable resources into being real people. Classical Greco-Roman civilization prized heroic and noble men as the indispensable guardians of all that was worthwhile.
It took Christianity to reveal the worth of non-warrior men, women, children, and slaves who comprised the rest of society. The Gospel of Luke in particular demonstrated Christ’s interest in, concern for, and commitment to these very people.
As Judeo-Christian Western Civilization was born, the universality of Christ’s redemption became a foundational belief. All humans are made in God’s image. Christ willingly died to redeem us all from the tyranny of sin.
Rich or poor, soldier or civilian, educated or ignorant, male or female, adult or child, free or slave; Christ offers us each the opportunity to accept His loving grace. As not one person He encountered was disposable to Jesus, no self-consciously Christian society should abide anyone’s dehumanization.
Antisemites who call themselves Christians would do well to remember the universality of Jesus’ message. While beginning His ministry as a Rabbi who taught in Synagogues, Jesus ultimately reached out to Samaritans, as well as to Roman Centurions and other Gentiles. Christ expanded the definition of God’s Chosen people from the Jews to include anyone who accepted His New Covenant. The New Covenant is indecipherable without the Old. Without Judaism, there would be no Christianity.
Jesus was no more an Antisemite than He was strictly a Jewish Rabbi. The nature of the Son of God reveals the insufficiency of all human expectations.
Jewish expectations about the Messiah were much more in keeping with a rebel leader named Simon Bar-Kochba than they were with the carpenter from Nazareth. Living a century after Jesus, Bar-Kochba was everything that Jesus was not; a noble war-leader committed to drive out the Gentiles and make a new Jewish Kingdom supreme. Jesus was a preacher, a healer, a sacrifice, and an example of the genuine nature of God. Bar-Kochba’s rebellion led to the Jews being cast out of Judea and dispersed throughout the known world.
Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection inspires all denominations of Christianity as well as Western Civilization to this day.
The Judeo-Christian influences on the West are manifest in all that is best in us. It has turned the proud heroes of the Iliad into the guardians of the weak. The concept of inalienable human rights stems from a Biblical understanding of the meaning of human life. Christianity has inspired countless generations of reformers to make our society better.
One example among many of the beneficial effects of Christianity is the fate of poor children outside of the West. Today, in many societies around the world, especially in the Islamic Middle East, children are exploited as sex slaves. But here in the West, the sexual exploitation of children is both a serious crime and remains one of the few matters that outrage people of all political convictions.
In many Arab, Turkish, Persian, and Afghani cultures, the sexual exploitation of children is at best considered to be unremarkably normal. At worst, it is publicly celebrated as a perquisite of success.
Christianity matters! Lived Christian virtues make the best case for undecided people to commit themselves to Christ. Christian ideals has produced in our shared Western society a slow but thoroughgoing reform that is intended to make us more fully live up to a Christian ideal.
We would be wise to remember this when we are next faced by an advocate of de-Christianizing our society to render it more “inclusive.” Were we to spit out the salt of the Earth, all that we would have left is dirt in our mouths.
