A generation ago our nation put strong pressure on the government of South Africa to abandon its policy of apartheid. It did so most successfully in the 1970’s by Australia boycotting the all-white cricket and rugby teams from South Africa. Not that we Aussies were all that squeaky clean when it came to our relationship to our own indigenous people… to say nothing of our white-Australia policy that was only effectively abandoned in 1973. Today, as I read things, South Africa virtually has apartheid in reverse with preferential treatment given to blacks. In more recent times we’re seen a huge protest movement called Black Lives Matter but at times that seems to be morphing into an anti-white movement. Why is the ugliness of racial discrimination such a problem in our world? When the Covid-19 pandemic first broke out why were people of Asian appearance often told to go back where they came from?
Let’s face it; prejudice not only rears its ugly head when it comes to skin colour and nationalities. History is full of accounts of prejudice also when it comes to social classes. I grew up in an industrial town where the work-force basically consisted of blue-collar workers. I recall attending a youth camp in my teens where there were also a large number of young people from a basically white-collar area of Melbourne. I felt keenly that we blue-collar workers were often snubbed by those from the white-collar suburbs. And maybe we didn’t always think too kindly of them either.
In the Bible the apostle James addresses this issue of prejudice too. In his case it wasn’t racial prejudice but more of a class problem – a prejudice based on the difference between the rich and the poor. He pictures a scenario where a rich man comes into church and is given a prominent seat in a position of honour, when a poor man comes in he’s told to sit on the floor. James has a few things to say about that, and rightly so. He refers to people who show that kind of partiality as judgmental people with evil thoughts. He points out that such people break God’s law to love our neighbour as ourselves.
It’s especially Christians who ought to stand firm against any kind of prejudice, whether it be racial or based on social classes… or anything else for that matter. For starters Christians believe that we are all made in the image of God. Furthermore, as sinners we are all in need of God’s forgiveness and mercy. And when we come to faith in Jesus Christ we all become brothers and sisters in the same family of God.
I served a church in Western Sydney for thirteen years and in that church of some 400 members we had fifteen different nationalities. It was a great delight seeing all those varied people worshipping the same God Sunday by Sunday. Different skin colours and different ethnic backgrounds… but singing the same hymns together. That was a little foretaste of heaven where there will be people from every tribe and nation and language.
When it comes to class differences once again the church ought to model an acceptance without any prejudice. In its better moments the Christian church does that well. It acts as the great leveller in society. I recall a church service in which the owner of a supermarket-chain participated in a communion service along with the check-out chick and the trolley boy. Together they ate the bread and drank the wine to remember the broken body and the shed blood of their Saviour.
In these days of the pandemic our government leaders have been telling us that we’re all in this together. But despite those claims we live in a world where factionalism is rife and were our social fabric is so often torn apart by prejudice – even while we share a common enemy in Covid-19. There’s a better way to find our unity and that is in the good news that Jesus gave His life for blacks and for whites… for the rich and for the poor? Our world desperately needs that kind of unity and to see it modelled in society.
John Westendorp