By George K. Werner (former education minister)
For my non-believing readers, please bear with me. In this reflection, I draw from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—not to blur their differences, but to read them side by side, through the lens of comparative theology. This is an attempt to learn from how each tradition understands redemption, guidance, and the stubbornness of human societies.
I have often wondered: why did God choose to work through human beings to redeem humanity?
Why not redeem from a distance—by decree, by force, by command?
In Christianity, the answer is radical and unsettling. God does not merely send guidance; God enters history. The Gospel of John puts it plainly:
“And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14)
Why flesh? Why weakness? Why vulnerability?
Christian theology suggests that redemption required proximity, not perfection. God did not save humanity from above, but from within. Not by selecting the spotless, but by inhabiting the broken. Not by bypassing sin, but by walking directly into a sinful world.
And God did not stop there.
God subjected Himself to what humans do to one another: cruelty, humiliation, suffering, pain, crucifixion, death—and only then, resurrection. The Apostle Paul captures the paradox with discomforting clarity:
“He humbled himself and became obedient unto death—even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:8)
Why go through all that?
Why not arrive, teach, correct, and depart?
Why the cross?
Why the blood?
Why suffering before redemption?
Jesus himself offers a metaphor that refuses shortcuts:
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24)
Why must the seed die in order to grow?
Because growth requires rupture.
Because new life demands the breaking open of what already exists.
Because the shell that protects the seed also prevents it from becoming anything more.
The seed is not destroyed for punishment’s sake. It is transformed. Its “death” is not an ending—it is a passage.
Islam answers the same human question differently—but no less powerfully.
Allah does not become human. There is no incarnation, no crucifixion. But there is still proximity, burden, and suffering borne by a human life.
Prophet Muhammad was not spared hardship. He was mocked, stoned, boycotted, exiled, betrayed. He buried children. He endured hunger. He was driven from his home. Revelation itself came as weight, not ease. The Qur’an describes it starkly:
“Indeed, We will cast upon you a heavy word.” (Qur’an 73:5)
Why him?
The Qur’an anticipates the objection:
“And they say, ‘Why was this Qur’an not sent down upon an angel?’” (Qur’an 6:8)
The answer is implicit: an angel could not model human weakness, temptation, fear, doubt, patience, or moral struggle. Guidance had to be embodied to be credible.
Allah says:
“There has certainly been for you in the Messenger of Allah an excellent example.” (Qur’an 33:21)
The message is divine.
The messenger is human.
That tension is the point.
Across Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the pattern converges: God does not outsource redemption. God works through flawed human beings—prophets who doubt, leaders who flee, messengers who suffer—because societies are transformed not by abstraction, but by example lived at great personal cost.
This brings me, uncomfortably, to Liberia.
Why does our country seem so stubborn to redemption? Why do corruption, betrayal, and moral exhaustion feel so deeply embedded? Why do reforms fail, leaders disappoint, and cycles repeat themselves with cruel predictability?
We often comfort ourselves with a familiar refrain: “The good ones never get elected.”
It sounds wise. It sounds realistic. It also absolves us.
But what if redemption—national redemption—does not come from the “good ones” at all?
What if it comes from one of us?
One who has erred.
One who has participated.
One who has benefited from the very systems they now recognize as unjust.
One who has seen his or her own wrongdoing clearly—and chooses to change.
In the biblical tradition, repentance is never abstract. God says through the prophet Ezekiel:
“I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” (Ezekiel 33:11)
And the Qur’an echoes the same moral logic:
“Indeed, Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves.” (Qur’an 13:11)
Change is inward before it is national.
Perhaps Liberia keeps electing flawed—sometimes deeply compromised—leaders not because God has abandoned us, but because redemption is meant to come from within the very people we keep choosing.
This is not an argument for tolerating corruption. It is an argument for recognizing that transformation rarely comes from those who have never sinned, but from those who finally see the damage of their own sin clearly enough to turn back.
Boakai Jaleiba once wrote that “Society remembers those who leave scars.” It is a profound observation. History rarely records purity; it records impact. Not the untouched, but the marked. Not the cautious, but the consequential.
We want resurrection—but not crucifixion.
We want renewal—without cost.
Yet Scripture, across traditions, is unyielding: the seed must die.
If Liberia is to be redeemed, perhaps we too must pass through a kind of national dying—not physical destruction, but moral reckoning. The death of excuses. The death of impunity. The death of the belief that survival alone is success.
So yes—perhaps Liberia’s hope lies with one of the sinners. One who knows the rot because they once lived inside it. One who, having seen the abyss, chooses to turn around.
Redemption is never clean.
It is never cheap.
And it never arrives through angels.
It arrives human.
That possibility should unsettle us.
And it should give us hope.
