Friday; April 4, 2014
The Demonization of the Threatening “Other”
The passage from Wisdom is not in Protestant Bibles. Here is is (from the RSV).
[1] For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,"Short and sorrowful is our life,and there is no remedy when a man comes to his end,and no one has been known to return from Hades. …
[12] "Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;he reproaches us for sins against the law,and accuses us of sins against our training.[13] He professes to have knowledge of God,and calls himself a child of the Lord.[14] He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;[15] the very sight of him is a burden to us,because his manner of life is unlike that of others,and his ways are strange.[16] We are considered by him as something base,and he avoids our ways as unclean;he calls the last end of the righteous happy,and boasts that God is his father.[17] Let us see if his words are true,and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;[18] for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him,and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.[19] Let us test him with insult and torture,that we may find out how gentle he is,and make trial of his forbearance.[20] Let us condemn him to a shameful death,for, according to what he says, he will be protected."
[21] Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray,for their wickedness blinded them,[22] and they did not know the secret purposes of God,nor hope for the wages of holiness,nor discern the prize for blameless souls;
The passages for today both have an element of us against them rhetoric. Rohr’s first paragraph struck home to me. It is so easy to look at another group and demonize them, or look down on them, or even persecute them. And, in our day and age, the media will fan those flames because it makes them money <that is my cynicism coming through loud and clear>.
Jesus suffers the brunt of this kind of attack, and all he can do is claim his true origin which of course falls on deaf ears. I wonder where I would have stood in that crowd? One of the taunters and attackers, one of the defenders, or one of the silent bystanders?
