Words from WW Blog

I wrote a paper in my last year of seminary entitled “Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted.” It came as a result of taking a class on Liberation Theology and the influence of one of my professors, Tom Finger, and Tony Campolo. My area of concentration was the exploitation of people in Third World nations by multi-national corporations in order to maximize profits and make their shareholders happy in places like the United States and other wealthy countries around the globe. remember being alarmed by stories that Campolo told about some of the largest and wealthiest corporations and the work conditions of their employees, and the low wages they would pay for back-breaking work.

Oppression is a theme that runs throughout the Bible. It goes to the heart of the human condition, that someone in power will do whatever is necessary to keep that power and expand it. For example, King Herod had all of the Jewish male babies two-years-old or less in the vicinity of Bethlehem killed because he had heard of a new king that had been born. Power corrupts and the powerful oppress anyone who threatens them.

On the other hand, oppression is sometimes mis-diagnosed these days. That is, just because someone says he is oppressed doesn’t mean that he actually is oppressed. Oppression is a term that gets thrown in the air like a red hanky by a coach at an NFL football game. To dumb down the terminology, anyone who whines enough seems to have the power to convince someone or some group that it’s oppression. Imagined oppression gets conveyed as real oppression.

So, who are the oppressed, the downtrodden? Who are those who have no voice and no hope? It has little to do with whatever label you’re wearing, conservative or liberal…union or management…educated or illiterate…rural or urban.

According to scripture, the oppressed include the poor who have no voice, the hungry who have no food, the pawns who are pushed to the side without the hope of justice, the enslaved who can only sing of a coming jubilee, and the peaceful folk who have war cast upon them.

Like a “Where’s Waldo” picture, other causes try to graft themselves into the scenery of the oppressed. Often, however, they are the whines of those who believe they are entitled. Entitlement is the ugly step-sister of an oppressed Cinderella on her hands and knees commanded to scrub the floor of other people’s mud.

This entry was posted on November 13, 2023 at 2:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.