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.
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