Thursday, March 20, 2008
Today's chunk contains several episodes of the religious leaders challenging Jesus, seeking to trap him into contradicting himself or saying some sort of heretical affirmation. They fail repeatedly mostly because of their ego-centric underestmation of Jesus. Each time they ask Jesus a question he basically asks them a question back (in the rabbinical tradition).
How often do we do the same thing?; look for an answer we want to hear to confirm our judgements and stereotypes as opposed to truly listen, engage and dialogue with each other? Jesus pushes all there to go farther, deeper, to confront life, death, and how we live each day. I'm struck by Obama's speech yesterday in which he pushed us as a nation community to face the hard issues, to go deep, to not skim the surface and skip to the next "hot" topic. That's what faith is about - living life fully from birth to death, seeking to live each moment from a spiritual center, to live not by reacting to everything but by responding to the world around us. No wonder they wanted to arrest and kill Jesus...he'd pissed them off by asking what they wanted to overlook, but holding the authorities accountable. How do we do that today? Do we today? On this day of the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq, how are we as followers of Jesus challenging the powers around us to authentic, organic, coherent actions? We the people that affirm that Jesus "give us his peace, not as the world gives," that "Blessed are the meek and the peace-makers," that Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life," that "whatever we have done to the least of these, we have done to Christ." What are we doing? How are we testifying? How are we integrating our life, work, faith, decisions, rest and relationships?
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