Hard Work



It is hard work being the people of God. It is hard to step outside the values and common understandings that hold a society together. If you don’t believe me them have a look at all our readings today. Each one seeks to disturb the safe assumption that the status quo was good enough. And in each case God invites, pushes for, demands a much bigger understanding of what it is all about.
Last week we began a small time in the wisdom literature, and this week we begin a little foray into Proverbs. The wisdom literature of the First Testament can be understood largely as the minority opinion standing against the dominant view of the world. Howard Wallace says,
“One helpful way of viewing the wisdom literature overall is to see some of it as mainstream wisdom, and other books as ‘wisdom-in-revolt’. Mainstream wisdom tended to believe that people could ensure a good life by fearing God and following the ways of God with care. If bad things happened, they were an indication that a person had made a foolish choice or worse. The book of Proverbs and some of the wisdom Psalms take this approach. In the books of Ecclesiastes and Job, however, the connection between being a good person and living a happy life is questioned. In both these books, there is an acknowledgment that sometimes, bad things happen to good people.”[1]
So the understanding that good people live happy lives is one understanding that still has a lot of followers today. Another is the divisions in society based on rules and attitudes that dictate some people as being in, and others as out based on things like people religions, ethnicity, class, gender. Sadly religion was and is used to reinforce these. And these rules and attitudes are so hard to let go of. They are ingrained, held deep within our cultures.
We can see how hard that is to change in todays readings. Proverbs offers an alternative view on how to build a “good life”. James shows how easily we get caught up in societal understandings of who is of value and who is not. Even Jesus seems to get caught up in this. And yet he is able to acknowledge the courage of the Gentile woman and step outside of everything his culture and religion said was proper. That is our task to. To live in a way that expresses God’s profound love and compassion for all people, especially those who are poor, marginalised, despised. That is where God is.



[1] http://hwallace.unitingchurch.org.au/WebOTcomments/OrdinaryB/PentecostBProv22.html

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