A Funeral and a Wedding

Saturday was a topsy turvy world for me. In the morning, I went to work in Central. In the evening, I went to a funeral in Hunghom and then a wedding in Wanchai. The work was tedious as usual. I had to provide answers to some 31 questions and had to go through more than 10 4-inch box files of documents to find the relevant answers. With patience and method and the assistance of a summer student, I managed to find answers for nearly all of them. It's not something I could not handle.

What I could not handle is the way a certain preacher tried to make use of the occasion of the funeral to "preach" the word of God. She was a lady in early 30s with a clean sharp face, clear skin, high round forehead, small eyes beneath a pair of weak half-moon eyebrows, small straight nose and thin lips surrounded by strong jaws and had a soft wheedling voice. The Christian ceremony started out with a minute of silence. Then she started with Luke 8: 52. Jesus said, "Weep not, she is not dead but sleepeth." Then followed a psalm which all had to sing together about how merciful the Lord is, how much peace we lose, how much we suffer in vain, how we despair upon meeting difficulties, how weak we are, how heavy the burden upon our shoulders, how we feel deserted by our friends and family, before falling into the bosom of Jesus who would give us protection, consolation, free us from our worries, how he would give us refuge etc. And then followed the favourite Psalm 23: "He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restored my soul. He leadeth me in the path of righteousness for his name's sake. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou prepareth a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely good and mercy will follow me all the days of my life: I will dwell in the house of the Lord." These are usual in a Christian funeral service.

At that funeral service in Hunghom, I saw how the preacher made use of the moments when any ordinary person who is not emotionally stone dead is most vulnerable because of the kind of grief and sorrow they experience upon the sight of the dead, to preach time and again one and the same message and one-size-fit-all solution and one panacea: "Believe in Jesus". I am amazed at how she was able to support every point she made including the need to observe the rules made by God and how if we don't we will burn in hell,with a quotation from the Bible, exactly like the old rabbi who said, "It is said in the Torah etc....".  I am even more amazed at how firmly she takes every word of the Bible as "literally" the "word of God.". What she said might have been more acceptable had she qualified what she said with the remark that nobody knew what Jesus really said but that no matter what the truth might have been, in her personal opinion, some of the things said in the Bible made a lot of sense and it might be useful if we were to take them into account when we make our own decisions in different kinds of social situations in our daily lives. But she does not appear to be aware that the old Testament had been written by hundreds of different authors, how even the orthodox and expurgated New Testament have got 4 different versions ( many of the expurgated versions before the 5th century CE have since been discovered by archaeologists) and how the earliest of which was written only some 40 years and the latest more than a century AFTER the death of Jesus  and that Jesus did NOT write down anything by himself at all and how what he was credited to have said often conflict with one another even on matters of "facts", and how there are different versions of the famous 8 (in some version 10) Beatitudes, and on how many and what miracles Jesus performed, how there are conflicting versions of where exactly Jesus was born, how Jesus actually died and whether he actually rose from the dead and the circumstances he was said to have resurrected, how there are different versions of what Jesus did after he rose from the dead and where and when he "ascended into heaven" etc. Does she know the original meaning of the word "hell" which in the original Aramaic version of the Bible merely meant a particular low area outside of Jerasalem where the Jews used to burn rubbish and for that reason particularly hot and not the kind of "hell" subsequently elaborated in paintings by Medieval artists? And she attacked the Buddhist idea of hell as portrayed in the Tiger Balm Garden as "false"! Is there any need for that? Do we really know if there is "truly" a  physical place(s) corresponding to that? Is it not more likely that the concept of "hell" might just be a "metaphor" which simple minded people have taken "literally"? She merely went on and on for nearly half an hour believing that she is rendering a great service to God and misleading her flock by her well intentioned ignorance by talking about a literal place called "hell" with live fire and all! When I saw the self-satisfied expression on her face with the apparent "correctness" of her views which she delivered with such complete confidence that they represented eternal "truths", I had a most difficult time restraining myself from walking out right in the middle of the service. For the sake of not embarrassing the family of the deceased, the mother-in- law of my wife's younger sister, I stayed in my seat insteading of storming out in disgust. I felt so sorry for Jesus.

Does she realize that she to has to be sensitive to the feelings of the relatives of the deceased and ought perhaps merely to comfort them with just a few words that she believed that the deceased will probably be welcome by the Lord for having suffered 9 months and that her passing away would finally give her a respite from further sufferings. What angers me is her "exploitation" of this moment of emotional vulnerability of her flock to "indulge" in spreading the "good news" of the coming of the Lord! If God truly exists, I wonder whether he would have been happy to have such a "servant"! Surely, Jesus came to this Earth to show us "how" exactly to love and not just the "need" to love others and how to worship God by loving what God loves, ie. our neighbors. Had she practised what she preached, she might have been more sensitive to the feelings of the friends and relatives of the deceased and cut short her inordinately long "preaching" because surely one of the requirments of love is to be sensitive to the needs of the others, not just the need of oneself as a "preacher" to preach.

To me, there is one fatal flaw in the Christian idea of God as a jealous, exclusive and all powerful God which might have encouraged the kind of behavior I observed. The concept of "God" has been fashioned in the image of a tribal god. His "supreme" authority seems to remove him from common humanity. Because of this idea of the supremacy of God, every thing which is "merely" human is considered of little or no worth, when compared to the excellence and perfection of God. For this, we have that Roman Jewish ex tent seller and Jesus-persecutor stricken by a bad cosncience turned super-salesman and top-notch Jesus promoter called the apostle Paul to thank. It is precisely on account of this idea of the exclusive supremacy of God, that God is everything and man absolutely nothing, which had led so easily to the blood-shed of religious wars, the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of witches, the extermination of the Incas civilization, the expropriation of the land of the North American Red Indians, the Austalian aborigines, the imperialistic idea of the "Whiteman's Burden", and all other kinds of man's inhumanity to man, all in the holy name of spreading the "good news" (which is what the gospels are all about.): absolute ideas! If Christian theologians do not restore the "human" face of God, we will certainly see a God who is more and more remote from man. I don't think that would have been what Jesus came to this earth for. If I am right, Jesus came to give back a 'human" face to the Jewish God and to demolish the image of God as an inexorable and harsh Law Giver, as advocated by the Pharisees of his age. If Jesus were still alive today, I have the gravest doubt if he would be very happy with what some of his "preachers" are doing in his name.

What happened at the funeral is repeated by the pastor at the weddding. He too made use of the occasion to do some preaching and repeated how Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding of Cana and reminded us of the Biblical injunction that "What God put together, let no man put asunder." Mercifully, the pastor, a man in his 50s, judging from his almost bald head, was rather more restrained and did not take more than two or three minutes to do so. As a result, we had rather more time to enjoy the delicious food of the wedding feast. Nonetheless, the wedding banquet at the Grand Hyatt did not finish until 11.30 p.m because of all the "entertainment" packed into the banquet by the "wedding planners"!