Good Friday church sitting arrangement

The steward shooed him away to make room for me. I protested but it was too late. So, I sat in the front row. It was Good Friday at church; the day when the death of Christ is remembered. I tried to connect the significance of Good Friday with what the steward just did; and it left me with a feeling much deeper than uncomfortable.

 

The front rows in our churches have become reserved for the so-called ‘VIPs’ of our society. The social stratification of our society gets played out in our church sitting arrangements. Church has failed to be a place of counter-culture; a place where people feel equal, if only for a few hours every week. So, it is understood and accepted that some people are of more value than others. This value of people is assessed on the basis of possession of material wealth or college degree. Who in heaven or earth has taught us that these are the measuring rods of human worth?

God made us all in his image: the poor and the rich, the educated and the uneducated, the slave and the free, men and women. No one has he made with any special material that they be more valued than others. In sin, we all fell; and so in redemption, Christ died for all without exception.

God knows what we have become. He knows that some people are treated like sub-humans. He sees the injustice, the perpetrators and the oppressed. So, his equal love for all humans turns into his preferential compassion for the downtrodden. His justice for the injustice requires him to go soft on the oppressed and come down hard on the oppressors. Those who seek to know the heartbeat of God will be pained by the things that hurt God and do what God would in the face of such injustice. 

I don't claim moral superiority for I know how often I fall. But after church service, I did apologize to the man who was shooed away.