The Hard Stuff

"Jesus began to reproach the towns where most of his mighty deeds had been done, since they had not repented..."

Matthew 11:20

 

On Pray-As-You-Go this morning they ask a pondering question...why do you think the people who heard and watched Jesus did not do what he said? Oh, that's easy, I thought to myself. Because Jesus said really hard stuff.  Love your enemies. Love your neighbor; oh, and by the way, your neighbor is the person you dislike the most. As we learned in the Gospel of the Good Samaritan, Jesus made a hero of the Samaritan and the Jews hated the Samaritans. No wonder the people didn't listen to him...he turned their prejudices upside down by telling them they couldn't have prejudices! And we, even after two thousand years of Jesus' teachings, have the same difficulty as the people of Chorazin and Bethsaida.  We feel better about our own failures by pointing out the failures of others. When, instead, we could humbly recognize our failures and try to learn what they teach us. As Fr. Richard Rohr points out, we don't eradicate our failures by defending them or projecting them onto others. We humbly accept that we fail and learn what we can from it. Probably the most important thing we can learn is that we can't fix ourselves. We need to put our own egos to bed and stop putting others down to soothe ourselves.  That just doesn't work in Jesus' Kingdom.  Love, heidi