The heart-wrenching story of Brian Mwakero’s cancer-stricken family, as featured in Daily Nation last Friday, presents a touching examination of fragility and perseverance.
Their story calls upon us to contemplate the march of disease that can invade even the most sacred domains of life. Cancer has spent the last three decades tightening its grip on Kenyan households, leaving a trail of devastation that mocks the steadfast faith of many.
Especially within the poorest communities, where the gospel of Jesus and Christianity are deeply intertwined, it slips into their lives with a cruelty that almost feels personal.
Those who believe most fiercely often find themselves carrying crosses carved from grief. They pray, they fast, they believe in a God of miracles, yet the disease rips through their homes, snatching loved ones, bankrupting families, and leaving behind agonising questions: “Why us?” “Why us again?” Cur bonis mala fiunt? Why do the good suffer while, as the Psalmist laments, the wicked flourish like a green bay tree? Life, in its stoic indifference, marches forward, yet the heart remains moored to these losses.
We look outward and see the American couple, Darwin Deleon and Wangui Ndirangu, who, after a brief respite in Kenya recently, lost all three of their children in a sudden, violent wreck just days before returning home. We search the skies for the ministering spirits promised in Hebrews, yet hear only the hollow echo of our own grief.
Where were the legions of angels? What is the essence of a life that can be extinguished as easily as a candle in a restless wind?
Seeking answers, many turn instinctively to scripture, only to discover a vast library of tension and paradox. We encounter a God who seems to wear two masks.
One is the stern, tribal warrior-God of Sinai, and the other, the self-emptying lamb of Calvary. The Bible does not hide this dissonance. In the arid landscapes of Leviticus, the law is one of symmetry and cold justice.
“Anyone who injures their neighbour is to be injured in the same manner. Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” This lex talionis was meant to restrain vengeance and place a boundary around human fury, yet it paints a portrait of a deity who balances the scales with blood and bone.
Contrast this with the radical subversion of the Galilean. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus ascends a mountaintop and, with a few sentences, dismantles centuries of retributive justice: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evildoer. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also.”
Here, the theological tectonic plates shift beneath our feet. We move from the preservation of the self to the prodigality of the soul, from measured justice to unmeasured mercy.
But how do we reconcile these visions? Is the God who thundered from the burning bush the same Father whom Jesus addressed in the shadows of Gethsemane?
The Old Testament often reads like a chronicle written in the ink of conquest. In Deuteronomy, the divine mandate is harrowing. If a city resists the offer of peace, the command is to “put to the sword all the men in it.”
In more distant cities, the decree descends into total erasure: “Do not leave alive anything that breathes.” This holy terror reaches its crescendo at the walls of Jericho.
In Joshua, when the trumpets fall silent and the ramparts crumble, the narrative tells us they “devoted the city to the Lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it, men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep, and donkeys.”
The text offers a chilling theological rationale: “For it was the Lord himself who hardened their hearts… so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy.”
To the modern mind, and perhaps even more to the grieving heart, this appears as a brutal, vindictive nihilism. How does one harmonise the God who hardens hearts to ensure destruction with the God who is love?
It is astonishing how often church leaders stand in pulpits proclaiming “the true gospel” while carefully avoiding the uncomfortable contradictions embedded in the very scriptures they claim to defend.
The Old Testament is filled with scenes of violence, wars commanded by God, entire populations wiped out, and suffering portrayed as divine testing. Yet, when these passages clash with the New Testament’s message of love, forgiveness, and enemy-embracing compassion, the bishops simply glide past the tension as if the contradiction does not exist. You cannot preach a God of mercy on Sunday and ignore the God who sanctions slaughter in Joshua, Judges, and Samuel.
You cannot insist that God is always good while refusing to address why the righteous suffer catastrophically, why a single family watches six loved ones battle cancer while the wicked prosper.
Instead of wrestling with these contradictions, too many bishops retreat into vague platitudes: “God has a plan,” “His ways are higher,” “Suffering builds faith.”
These phrases may soothe the speaker, but they do nothing for the believer who is mourning and drowning in grief. A gospel that cannot face hard questions is not a gospel rooted in truth.
If church leaders want moral authority, they must stop cherry-picking scripture and start acknowledging the Bible’s complexity. They must confront the violence in the Old Testament and the tension between divine justice and divine love.
Dissect the pilgrimage from the ruins of Jericho to the compassion of the Cross. Anything less is not spiritual leadership, but avoidance dressed up as holiness.
