Who's the servant? Who's not?

When you find yourself surrounded by people who would readily smile and shake hands with politically correct thieves, destroyers of young lives and the incompetent, rather than work with someone who swears, seriously runs after hardened criminals and promote meritocracy in society, then you'd simply know that you need to shed off a lot of things.

This is an imperfect world that gives us an array of imperfect options. So, let's do a bit of reflection.

When a criminal enters a man's home and touches his family, that man will tackle that criminal and kill him on the spot if the situation so requires. Only then can we expect that man to pause and pray for that lost soul and, perhaps, his own. That man won't care about any political correctness nor the prospect of going to jail. All he'd care about is the survival and honor of his family, whatever that would take.

You don't fight human instinct for survival and protection for loved ones. You cherish it! You think God has driven Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden without it? Or how else would Adam and Eve survive in a world where they have to cultivate their own food and live with the wild animals (and people) that no longer recognize them?

The self-righteous can talk all day about the man I described earlier. But when I meet such a man on the street, I will shake his hands tightly, with no spoken word, but with eyes full of admiration.

But there's another kind of man that I admire much more. I admire the most the Christian man who works silently on the ground to bring people to Christ, shunning all types of partisan politics, acting without seeking any reward, save that of the joy of saving a desperate man's soul. When we win someone to Christ, we save another man from having to kill a criminal.

That, I believe, is the essence of the gospel today. Yes, we do not want a punisher in our temporal world. But have we done enough to bring people to Christ so that the laws of the world will be rendered irrelevant? How good are we in being the servant of all?

De Lima was the former Justice Secretary, before she decided to run for the Senate. This Facebook screenshot was taken on May 17, 2016 at 1:45pm. In 3 hours it gathered 1,500 reactions, 566 shares and 305 comments. Why is that?

Until then, I believe Christ himself won't stop a Punisher in our midst. After all, wasn't Christ there when God sent the Egyptian army to their death, when the serpents bit the ungrateful Israelites to their deaths in the desert and punished King Saul for disobeying Samuel about not sparing anybody and anything in Canaan?

What did Christ say about Pontius Pilate?

"At that time some people who were present there told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices. He said to them in reply, 'Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were greater sinners than all other Galileans? By no means! But I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!'" (Luke 13:1-3 NAB)

I believe the Philippines has a Duterte today because we have focused too much on self-righteousness rather than humbly making the call to repentance to people on the ground with compassion in our hearts. Had we done enough, there would have been no need for a Duterte. We need to learn more, terribly more, about being a servant of all.