The Sunday Mail
HUMAN beings can be laughably naïve, hopelessly fickle and unhelpfully cynical.
A little more than 2 000 years ago, human beings accomplished the most unenviable, dubious and unwanted distinction of killing God ostensibly for the crime of being God.
You see, it is still difficult for some people to accept that Jesus Christ was really God, which is understandable since the mysticism of faith and religion is largely inscrutable.
It is therefore, unsurprising that one of the major areas of theological scholarship and enquiry is around the Holy Trinity — the belief that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit make up one God.
Bishop Lazarus once told you about the Bishop of Hippo (in Algeria), who was called Aurelius Augustinus, or better known as Saint Augustine.
His name is proudly emblazoned on many local and international institutions.
He was much a critical thinker as he was an accomplished theologian.
A story is told of how one day St Augustine, who was taking a stroll by the seashore, had an interesting encounter with a young boy who was frantically toing and froing from the sea to a spot on the sea shore.
In fact, the boy was using a sea shell to carry the water from the sea into a small hole in the sand.
He approached the boy and asked him what he was doing, to which the minor explained his impossibly grand endeavour of emptying out the whole sea into his small hole using a sea shell. After he courteously told the boy how impossible the task was, his newly found energetic acquaintance paused and looked him straight in the eye before telling him how it was similarly impossible for him to try and comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with his “small intelligence”.
No sooner had he turned his eyes away to process what he had just been told than the small boy vanished.
The revelations from this divine apparition were instantly taken as a message to describe how impossible it was for a mere creation to get into the mind of the Creator.
So, when human beings killed Jesus Christ — purportedly for “blasphemously” claiming to be the Son of God — they actually killed God.
Mobocracy
For Bishop Lazarus, the way the whole trial that preceded the execution degenerated into a ridiculously farcical event is the most interesting detail.
After Caiaphas Caiaphas — the high priest who presided over the Sanhedrin, which was the supreme council of Jews that controlled civil and religious law — had scandalously found Jesus guilty of blasphemy, it meant the accused had to be executed.
However, in Roman-occupied Jerusalem, the Jews did not have the power to execute anyone, so Jesus was taken from the religious court and sent to the secular court presided by the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.
There was, however, one problem: Blasphemy was not a crime under secular laws.
But Pilate, who couldn’t find any crime Jesus had committed, capitulated under immense pressure from the long-serving and powerful Caiaphas.
He cowardly surrendered Jesus to the mob, where his fate was sealed.
The laughably naïve, hopelessly fickle and unhelpfully cynical mob rather preferred to pardon the dreaded murderer, Barabbas, than to have Jesus, who hadn’t committed any crime against them, live another day.
This is the way the mob works: It exalts criminals and condemns the innocent; it worships expediency and desecrates rationale; and it celebrates cynicism and condemns optimism.
Often-times, the good is overlooked, while mistakes are accentuated.
And ever since the advent of social media, particularly the explosion of Facebook and Twitter after 2006, cynics have found a new church, where the sneering supposed intellectuals — who always do not miss an opportunity to snobbishly flaunt intellectual honorifics such as Doctor, Engineer, Professor, Pastor, et cetera — are the high priests.
The Bishop does not have to name them, all you need to do is log on to Zimbabwe Twitter, read the titles and judge for yourself the corrosive and debasing dross they will be unloading daily with obscene regularity.
In this new cyber world, especially on Twitter, one does not have to do anything bad to attract the murderous and tyrannical wrath of the mob, which is mostly driven by herd mentality.
Voicing a different view or opinion from the one they hold will get you lynched.
Man in the arena
While they continue to flog President ED, he continues to work. Don’t be distracted by those who are talking about a demonstration on July 31, which was stillborn even before it was conceived, but rather consider this date as an epochal milestone to mark the current Government’s two full years in office.
Which means it still has three more years to go. Now, the cynics would rather have you believe that Government has abjectly failed in achieving that which it promised the electorate two years ago.
Of course, they would rather not talk of the extraordinary progress that has been made on dam construction, where Causeway Dam (near Marondera), which was allocated $128 million in the 2020 Budget, will be completed this year, while the major dam project, Gwayi-Shangani, which was allocated $400 million by Treasury last year, is on course to be delivered by 2022.
All things being equal, Marovanyati Dam, which the President promised to the Buhera folk in May 2018 — when work was just at 70 percent — will be completed this year.
Those who travel regularly will tell you of the miracles happening on our roads, not least on the Harare-Beitbridge Highway, where men and machine are daily toiling to deliver a quality and trafficable highway.
All this is being achieved without a dime from international financiers such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is the same progress that is being made in agriculture, mining, including the major work of overhauling old institutions into fit-for-purpose entities that can drive an economic take off.
Everywhere you care to objectively look, the old is making way for the new.
Few would ask why the country is managing to keep the lights on while some countries that have been fortunate enough to be lavished with international financial support are reeling under load-shedding. Few would also ask why our shops are fully stocked, even though the products are expensive, when the country, like any other country around the world, is reeling from the fallout from the coronavirus.
For Bishop Lazi, the duty to develop Zimbabwe, which is in the interest of every Zimbabwean irrespective of political totem, race, religion or creed, does not have to be Government’s duty alone.
It is shared.
It is a duty that was so articulately enunciated by former US President Theodore Roosevelt on April 23, 1910 during a speech he made in France describing the role of a citizen in a republic. In his speech, Roosevelt mercilessly railed against unhelpful cynics, who seem to have a penchant for trivialising weighty matters.
“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt . . .
“A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities — all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness,” he said.
Most importantly, like the Bishop, Roosevelt knew that it is not the sneering cynic that would count at the end of the day, but the indefatigable effort of the doer.
He memorably observed: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It was a fiery speech which has over the years been used to stir the indomitable spirit in man.
It was also so moving that Nelson Mandela, whose colourful life was commemorated yesterday, most famously gave a copy of the aforementioned passage to then Springboks captain, Francois Piennar, before the team’s 1995 Rugby World Cup victory against the All Blacks of New Zealand.
What Bishop Lazi knows, however, is that the disproportionate cynicism that is daily churned out by these sneering cyber-based intellectuals and their converts, who are invariably found in opposition political parties, will only succeed in creating a parallel universe of false realities that will delude them to another drubbing and reality check in 2023.
Our future, whether as friends or foe, is shared, and hate, toxicity and cynicism will lead us nowhere.
We either sink or swim together, so why don’t we just swim together?
Bishop out!
