Catholics and other mainstream churches worldwide celebrated Ash Wednesday on March 5, 2025 to mark the beginning of 40 days of fasting, prayer, repentance, and alms giving, concluding on Easter Sunday. This period, commonly known as Lent, is for introspection, individually and collectively, for missteps that blind us from being sensitive to the needs of others and from living a life that marks the identity of living Christian values.
The ashes symbolise human mortality and the need for God’s mercy as given in Genesis 3:19: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” When things are going well, we tend to forget that we are only mortal beings. This period of Lent, therefore, reminds us of our temporality in this world.
The Lenten season also reminds us of some fundamental basics of the Christian faith. We learn from the scripture that we fall from grace through wealth, honour and pride.
This teaching is well laid out in the temptation of Jesus according to the Gospels of Matthew 4:1-11 and Luke 4: 1-13. The three reminders that Jesus gives are straightforward: A person does not live on bread alone … Do not put the Lord your God to test … and worship the Lord your God and serve him only.
Let us draw some lessons from the teaching, given that we are a faith-practising country.
Firstly, having wealth is fine. However, accumulating wealth at the expense of other human beings is evil. The wealth generated from the misappropriation of public funds is enough to feed every single Kenyan and provide free basic medical care and universal education. Our roads would be better. Our cities and towns would be in better condition. Businesses would be booming. Wealth distribution among citizens would be fair. On the contrary, we are a country with significant inequality in almost every social sector. We put our faith to great shame.
Secondly, in the temptation of Jesus, we are warned to worship only God. However, because of our deep-seated greed, we worship people with large sums of money. We sell our faith, throw out Jesus to the gutters if only to receive guests with money, and destroy nature through logging, among other social evils, because we want money. With money, we can be worshipped at every turn. We turn ourselves into gods.
Spiritually speaking, it is a shame in some circumstances that we endear ourselves to people with money and forget human dignity when and where we have the capacity to generate resources by ourselves. Specifically, I am talking about the billions of taxpayer shillings we watch being siphoned off, leaving us destitute. We go begging before the very people who have stolen from the public. We justify that without money, prayers alone will not save us. Indeed! But we shouldn’t forget that we will be ten-fold richer if we stop worshipping wealth. Wealth is not an end. When we helplessly watch public funds being squandered, we should be embarrassed to seek help from politicians or wealthy people. No doubt, we are and will always need money from others. However, by the Lenten spirit, we cannot allow conditions that make us less human to flourish. The result is creating moneybag gods to whom we shall remain indebted no matter how wicked they become.
Let me profit from this Lenten season to argue a cause for action. Fundraising for religious purposes, including the construction of worship places, should pause for one year before the election date 2027. Why?
Any properly constituted and prayerful religious institution would know in conscience that capitalising on campaign euphoria is an apparent good. You get support from political candidates desperate to attract votes. While many churches rely on donations and tithes to support their activities, Kenya’s political campaigns are, by and large, nothing but daylight bribery.
The number of daily handouts given to voters and the exponential number of harambees that are organised during election time sends a very wrong signal on the morality of accepting this kind of support. We do not live on bread alone. Do we?
Dr Mokua is the executive director of Loyola Centre for Media and Communication
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