Saturday, March 16, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
We are arguing ourselves to death
A division in the crowd occurred because of him.
Has there ever been a time when we humans didn’t disagree, and then count our opinion as more important than the other person? That is, when we have identified our opinion, and the other person’s opinion, as more important than what we have in common? Which, of course, is almost everything else.
We breathe together, and we breathe the same air. Doctors identify anomalies in each of us, but that’s because almost everything else inside our bodies is predictably the same. We get hungry, we get thirsty quicker, all of us. We have a way to communicate with each other, all of us. We wonder where we came from, and where we are going. All of us.
Many of us want to be remembered after we die. Not all of us, though. Kay Francis, famous in the 1930’s, wanted neither stone nor ceremony. Bobby Driscoll, child actor lent by Disney to RKO for a thriller called The Window and winner of a special Juvenile Academy Award, developed terrible acne, became a heroin addict, and was discovered dead, in an abandoned New York City tenement when he was 31. He could not be identified, was buried in Potter’s Field and recovered a year later when his mother asked the NYC police to check fingerprints.
So I see that in our human oneness we are each distinct, individual, down to the lines on our fingers and our palms. Our parents pass down genetics and beliefs. How can we become our unity as such diverse folks.
Some in the crowd who heard these words of Jesus said, “This is truly the Prophet.” Others said, “This is the Christ.” But others said, “The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he? Does not Scripture say …
The questions about Jesus continue to fascinate us, and continue to be unanswerable except through belief, in spite of former attorney Josh McDowell’s arguments in Evidence That Demands a Verdict. But the good questions, religious and political, are often replaced by Facebook fighting and X confrontations.
Jay Caspian Kang writes about this in The New Yorker:
That form of political discourse – millions of little arguments – is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the people posting believe that no amount of dissent will actually be heard. So they blame what have come to be known as the “mods,” establishment institutions that aim to govern and to regulate, to maintain credentials and decorum, especially the mainstream press and the academy, particularly its most elite schools.
Arguments between us, hosted by a satellite somewhere, offer little satisfaction, less understanding, but they somehow make us feel more solid, more real, at least while we’re exchanging insults. What is that about? Certainly not about what Jesus came to give us
The Pharisees asked the guards, “Why did you not bring him?” And the guards answered them, “Never before has anyone spoken like this man.”
Mr. Kang ends his article simply. “The Internet has placed a filter of unreality between us, but we are still real.”
Jesus will not let us forget that this reality, which lasts from before we’re born until after we die, is the most essential fact of all our lives.
(Jeremiah 11, Psalm 7, Luke 8, John 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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