Jesus, violence and the prophetical sermon

 
The numbers which portray the increase of violence in Brazil seem undeniable. And, curious fact, the percentage concerned to criminality is even bigger, according to official data, in places where poverty and material need are smaller.

Every time such data come to public, the federal government waves with a new security plan in which, according to official propaganda, will overcome the situation, hoping to calm the Brazilian population down, which is tired of so much violence, corruption and excesses in a country which, proudly, is considered Christian?

If statistics have any value, the last one released by the government brings symptomatic numbers.

Let’s see. Those who continually attribute violence to material need will have difficulties in explaining why Maranhão and Piauí, two Northeast states, very poor, show more civilized and inferior numbers than the rich Rio Grande do Sul and the wealthy Paraná.

In fact, as our confrere Jane Martins Villella once wrote in an article published in the journal O Imortal, violence has ever existed. Have we forgotten the two World Wars, Vietnam, Korea and the conflicts of Bosnia and Kosovo?

The world, obviously, is not worse because of this or that state of belligerence. The world is, in fact, though in slow fashion, getting better, since the numbers of those who kill, who embezzle from the public coffers, who don’t respect the others’ rights is infinitely smaller than those who long for peace, who live meagerly with small wages and those who, even though, respect others.

As J. Herculano Pires said, Earth doesn’t experience an involution crisis, but a revolution one, crisis foreseen by Jesus in the prophetical sermon, in which, before the final victory of the Gospel, that will be taught and practiced everywhere, there would be wars, earthquakes and much iniquity, but it doesn’t mean the end of the world, just the beginning of a new era.