Monday, September 5, 2022
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
What a wonderful world
Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?”
The scribes and Pharisees just looked at Jesus and didn’t say a word. They were tired of getting trapped by his impossible questions.
Looking around at them all, he then said to the man with a withered hand, “Stretch our your hands.”
Everyone held their breath.
Now I can’t believe the Pharisees weren’t excited by this power of Jesus, in spite of themselves. What were they thinking in their own minds, not influenced so much by the need to be like all the others?
The man stretched out his hand. And his hand was restored. And the scribes and Pharisees became enraged. They whispered among themselves, “What are we going to do with Jesus?”
Enraged they were!
What did the mothers of those Pharisees teach them when they were kids? G. K. Chesterton would not have been enraged, nor would he feel forced to agree with the opinions of those around him. His mother taught him well:
Will no one say how much every man owes to the tyranny and privilege of women, to the fact that they alone rule education until education becomes futile: for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything? The real thing has been done already, and thank God it is nearly always done by women.
Gilbert and Frances Chesterton had no children of their own, but they opened their arms and their home to many others. And in their tender affections, they helped educate these children, as they were taught as children themselves:
The whole world was to me a fairyland of wonderful fulfilments, and it was like living in some Hebraic age, when prophecy after prophecy came true. I went out as a child into the garden, and it was a terrible place to me, precisely because I had a clue to it: if I had held no clue it would not have been terrible, but tame …the garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn, inch by inch.
Chesterton would have made a lousy Pharisee. He might cherish the orthodoxy of the Church, but he turns it over and over to see what might appear, just as he did in the “garden of childhood.”
Now, accepting Christendom as a mother, I look at everything with the old elvish ignorance and expectancy. This or that rite or doctrine may look as ugly and extraordinary as a rake, but I have found by experience that such things end somehow in grass and flowers. (Orthodoxy, Chapter IX, p. 103)
We spend lots of time with Jasper, who will be three years old for eleven more months. Every day he teaches us something, and we teach him something too. I do not want to be a hypocrite or a Pharisee. I do want to walk with Jasper in the garden, in GK’s garden:
The garden of childhood was fascinating, exactly because everything had a fixed meaning which could be found out in its turn, inch by inch.
Jesus walks with all of us like that, showing us so much we would never see by ourselves.
This is a wonderful world. (Be sure to click this link)
Let all who take refuge in you be glad and exult forever. Protect them, that you may be the joy of those who love your name.
(1 Corinthians 5, Psalm 5, John 10, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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