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| The Radical Covenant of Mercy |
"For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother."
(Mark 3:35, NRSVUE)
I used the Residential School system in Canada as an example of how horribly wrong religion can go when it swaps out manifest destiny and colonization for the radical mercy of God. But as can be seen in the following section I could just as easily have used Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Venezuela, or any number of other countries to make the same point.
Now I need to pivot this series to show how the prophet Jesus tried, till his very death, to get Israel to adopt a radical new societal norm: God's Radical Mercy above allegiance to family, nation, or ideology.
This will take at least three posts.
A short and non-inclusive list showing where residential school horrors also existed.
Colombia: Catholic orders, funded by the government until the 1970s, ran missions that forcibly separated Indigenous children and banned native languages.
Peru: Missionaries, particularly Dominicans, established schools in regions like the Amazon to oblige Indigenous groups, such as the Arakmbut, to attend and learn only Spanish.
Mexico: Government policy from the 1800s onward included education aimed at assimilation, with institutions like the internados (boarding schools) forcing Indigenous children to learn Spanish.
Venezuela: Religious orders, like the Capuchins, were given government contracts to run boarding and day schools for Indigenous peoples, such as the Warao, from the 1920s to the 1970s.
God's radical mercy.
The new family.
The Abrahamic faiths are in disagreement about just what Jesus was. Islam considers him a prophet second only to Muhammad, may his name be blessed. Judaism, at best, considers him deranged or deluded. Some Christians consider him God.
I consider Jesus a prophet. The prophet of the Jewish God known as Yahweh, anointed to bring the people of Israel back to the true faith.
This calling back to the true faith was a calling to live God's Radical Mercy. This was not a calling to the gentiles. Jesus was solely and entirely concerned with the people of Israel.
Israel had become a self-important chosen people of God who thought they were superior to everybody because God had chosen them. Jesus totally reversed that view. He demanded that the people of Israel love their neighbors. Pray for their enemies. Become a shining light to the gentile nations. A light that would show them the incredible radical mercy of God that made his rain to fall upon the righteous and the sinner without any difference.
This was not a call to become superior to anyone or any nation. This was a call to become the living, visible proof that God's Radical Mercy and Love could live within each and every one of us as individuals, as family, and as a nation.
Jesus failed.
Some may consider it blasphemy to think of Jesus as a failure. But that is exactly what he was. He did not call Israel back to their God. He did not show the people the path to living radical mercy and love.
His closest disciples and followers within a generation had set up an us versus them new religion that totally contradicted the message of Jesus.
The inevitable result of this failure was the manifest destiny and colonization that brought us the horror of the residential schools.
In the next posts I hope to prove that Jesus proclaimed a new family of God and that this new family through a radical refinement of Jewish faith stressing obedience to an ethical standard that transcends all other ties could bring unilateral ethical disarmament and piecing to the world.
Brian
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