JESUS AS A TEACHER OF WISDOM IN ANCIENT PALESTINE part 1 of 7

So far in this series of posts on the wisdom tradition we have been considering two core features of wisdom that are vital for building and sustaining more cooperative relations amid human diversity. These two core features are peaceableness (shalom, as flourishing) and human mutuality (wisdom is for all humankind). And we have been considering reliance on them chiefly in local community and regional contexts.

Soon the posts will be going international. We will be exploring biblical and related narratives in which the wisdom tradition played prominent roles in the international relations and foreign policy of the old-world Middle East. Afterward, we will experiment with ways in which the agency of wisdom may be relied on in international relations today, with a special focus on U.S. – Middle East relations and foreign policy decision making. But just before we go international, I thought it would be good to dedicate several posts to the disturbed, regional context of ancient Palestine in Jesus’ day, and how Jesus as a teacher of wisdom handled it.

Focusing on Jesus as a teacher of wisdom can be a bit difficult at first, at least it was for me, because other views of Jesus were prominent in my mind. As a Christian in America, I was taught to see Jesus as a healer and miracle worker, and as someone who was angry with the pharisees, and as someone who told great stories, and as the leader of twelve disciples, and so on. And especially as the savior. “Reading” Jesus’ life through such frames, however, as true as all of those are, gave me a blind spot. I was unable to see Jesus as a wisdom teacher. Sure, I knew that Jesus was a teacher and that the New Testament called Jesus the wisdom of God. And I knew that Jesus told a lot of parables and that the parables were part of the wisdom tradition. But I had never linked “teacher” to “wisdom” or heard any Christian instruction which emphasized that.

It was not until I was well into the research for this new book that I started considering Jesus in his role as a teacher of wisdom. That led to some surprising discoveries in how Jesus handled his own version of our contemporary, pluralist regions, with their great ethnic, political, and religious diversity. These discovers have added immensely to how I see Jesus, and in ways that I would not want to live without.

These discoveries began after I decided to get a good picture of the cultural, social, political, and religious scene of ancient Palestine in Jesus’ day. Here are few vignettes.

It was the time of the Roman empire and the empire’s occupation of Palestine, which affected your aspirations across the spectrum of life. At the top of the empire was the emperor and his imperium, exercising absolute control, with the blessing and favor of the gods. Just as Israel’s political and social life was rooted in its belief in Yahweh, Rome’s was rooted in belief in the Roman pantheon of gods, with “Jupiter Great and Blessed” as its head.

Just below the emperor and his imperium were the aristocratic families and the Senate. These aristocratic families were what we today would call the elite. The fathers had absolute control over these families, and the fathers could be summoned by the emperor at any time for their counsel. Well-reputed fathers of aristocratic families could become elders in the famed Roman Senate, which was an advisory body on both domestic and foreign policy. But the Senate did not legislate or have executive power.

In short, you lived under the dictatorial powers of the emperor and his imperium who, when analyzing a situation or making policy, may or may not listen to his elite advisers in the Senate or to the counsel of the aristocratic fathers.

But there was more still: the complicated and powerful imperial system of the magistrates. It was through the complicated hierarchical structure of the Roman magesterium that the tremendous political and military power of the empire was exercised over its vast holdings. The magistrates were tasked with keeping society moving along like a well-oiled machine. It was a system of government that had authority and power to legislate, to put down rebellions, and even to wage regional wars. In his writings, Luke gives us poignant glimpses of the power, authority, and functions of this system of governance (Luke 23; Acts 16).

And then of course there were “the people.” The empire grew by increasingly conquering and absorbing under its rule all sorts of diverse societies, ethnic populations, religious people-groups, tribes, city-states, and so on. This eventually hugely pluralist enterprise came to be know as the populus Romanus, the people of Rome. But having been conquered, you did not automatically become a citizen of Rome. In fact, one of the more ingenious political and social features of the empire was to make it possible to become a Roman citizen. We know from historians and from Acts chapter 22 that if you were not born a citizen you could pay a large sum of money for the privilege. You then gained the rights of Roman citizenship. But in return for that you served the empire, especially if required to during times of war.

Last but by no means least was the Roman military. Rome was an empire of war, as are all empires. Before Rome conquered the many and diverse peoples that came to rule, those peoples often waged regional wars against one another. It was the increasingly vast military superpower of Rome that clamped down on local and regional aggression and thus held the widespread empire at least somewhat peaceably together. Roman emperors ensured that their military forces – typically arranged throughout the empire as “legions” and “century units” – suppressed revolts and kept social order. This was done under the authority of local and regional magistrates. The narrative recounted in Acts chapter 19 is a clear example of this authority being exercised during a riot at Ephesus.

We will pick it up from here with the next post.

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WISDOM AND OUR BETTER ANGELS

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln had the unenviable task of speaking to a country on the verge of civil war. In the speech he walked a fine line between the North and the South to try to hold the Union together. Perhaps he sensed that was impossible, that war was inevitable. Five weeks later the civil war began.

What, you may ask, does the U.S. civil war have to do with the wisdom tradition. Not much, I grant you. But many years ago when I was racking my brain to call up some apt metaphors for the wisdom-based approach to diversity that I write about, “the better angels of our nature” came to mind. It seemed promising, but I could not recall who said it or in what context. I found it at the very end of Lincoln’s first inaugural.

Having spoken about “so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric,” Lincoln said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” And then this, in which you can sense Lincoln’s gut telling him that the tipping point toward destruction had been reached:

“The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature” (March 4, 1861).

After mulling that over, I saw what Lincoln was on about. His use of the metaphor, in context, shows us his deep understanding of human nature – its penchant to swing from listening to a devil at one ear and an angel at the other ear. But more than that, although he was realistic about human nature, Lincoln was not a cynic, a pessimist, or an anarchist. The last sentence of his speech reveals a president who preferred relying on angels better than war and who wished Americans would go and do likewise.

Being someone who likes to discover origins, I went searching, but concluded that the phrase “the better angels of our nature” originated with Lincoln. A shout-out to Gene Griessman, however, for pointing out Dickens. In Dicken’s novel Barnaby Rudge, the narrator muses: “the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”

In an earlier post, I hinted that the sages were realistic about the human condition. I now want to a little more about that. The biblical wisdom literature is utterly realistic about human nature. No question. The literature repeatedly warns about folly, deceit, lying, laziness, cruelty, adultery, and many other all-too-human penchants. And often in stunning images. The point is to show why habitual acting on such impulses will devastate the life of an individual, a community, a nation.

Paradoxically, however, almost in defiance of that realistic picture, the sages seek to enable the kind of living that can seem a bit idealistic. They repeatedly call us to rely on the better angels of our nature. This comes into sharp relief in Proverbs, which stresses developing and cultivating attitudes, forms of communication, and ways of individual behavior and collective living that have as their goals the harmony and flourishing of our lives as communities and nations. And our political lives do not get to opt out of this.

In previous posts in this series on the wisdom tradition, I have stressed wisdom as a vital agency that advances shalom, healthy relationships, and mutual good amid human diversity. But there is with us everyday, day after day, that which seeks to run us into the ground, the shadows that seek to darken our paths.

So over the years, I have tried, and continue to try, to learn how to draw on the better angels of my nature when the devils are holding forth. I hope that you are too, and if you’re not, that you will begin to. Taking ongoing steps to learn wisdom and to make the wisdom way part of my DNA has been the best way I know to make the better angels more prominent. As a psychologist-friend once said to me, “Between stimulus and response is choice-point between being foolish or wise.” Choose wisdom, friends. Nothing that may be desired and sought is as precious as wisdom (Proverbs 8:11).

I think that the old-world sages of Scripture would have said a hearty “Amen!” to Lincoln’s image of the better angels, especially during that time when we were destructively divided, tearing our land apart, and killing one another. I also think the sages are turning over in the graves at how many devils are being listened to in our land today.

And I hope and pray for leaders with peaceable wisdom to arise and to be listened to, that perhaps by the mercy of the God we claim to believe in, our land may be spared a fate worse than that of a civil war.

A note from Charles: For more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present, try following the blog for a while, to see if you like it. You can always unfollow anytime. Just click here, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address, and click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice when I post a new article. And, hey, if you like this stuff, tell a friend! Thank you.

YOUR NEIGHBOR’S WISDOM

A number of posts in this series on the wisdom tradition have looked at ways in which our deepening reliance on wisdom helps foster cooperation and peace amid human diversity. This is easy for some people to accept. It can be quite difficult for others, especially for some religious people.

Timothy Keller, senior pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, knows something about this. Since its humble launch in 1989 with fifteen people, Redeemer has grown to three locations that now see thousands of worshipers every Sunday. But it’s not the numbers I want to call attention to. It is the fact of Redeemer’s growth in Manhattan, which may be America’s most culturally diverse city. Tourists can even go on multicultural sightseeing tours to experience the diversity close-up. No joke.

You never know what to expect in Manhattan. Some years ago after meetings at the Council of Foreign Relations, I had to catch a cab to the airport. The driver was a young guy recently arrived from Pakistan, and I will tell you that not only was it hard to understand him, but we were suspicious of each other early on. But he was very chatty and we soon were talking about Pakistan’s politics, where we discovered during the half-hour drive a lot of common ground in that area. We also discovered how much about “politics and religion” that we agreed on. When I was paying the fare, we both quite naturally by then commented about how good it would be if we had more time to talk.

It is in that Manhattan where Tim Keller honed his diversity skills, for which he has become well known around town. Some unkind souls may say, well, what do you expect? He has compromised the faith. No, no. This is not that. The wisdom-based, peaceable possibilities of diversity that we have been considering can take place among Christians, Muslims, and Jews who know what they believe and what each other believes. They are fully aware of the irreconcilable differences between their faiths. They are open and honest with one another about that.

I remember a meeting where Muslim and Christian leaders in the room said: I wish you would convert to my faith, but that is not what we’re here for; this meeting has been convened to try to find a way to work together across boundaries to solve a problem. These leaders knew that their irreconcilable core differences need not prevent public collaboration on an initiatives of mutual good.

If you are a Christian who struggles with this, note what Keller has to say. I asked him about it a few years ago during a conference call. He locates this kind of pluralist engagement and “learning from the other” in the Bible’s teaching of common grace. Simply put, all human beings, whether they are Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, or whether they believe in God or not, share gifts of wisdom, insight, creativity, and beauty because these gifts come to everyone. Christians call this common grace, Keller said, because they consider these as gifts that come from God. “If that’s the case,” he concluded, “then I could expect that my neighbor who does not believe anything like I believe might still have wisdom from God that I have to listen to.”

WISDOM AND TIKKUN OLAM: HEALING BROKENNESS

One of the ways we learn wisdom is from other people. I’m a big believer in that. It happens to me so often I could write a book about it! Sometimes the received wisdom is so pertinent to something I am doing that it is utterly amazing. Fills in a huge blank in my thinking.

So, a story about one time. I occasionally have conversations about the wisdom tradition with Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff, a friend who is a gifted negotiator and mediator. During dinner a kosher deli in Washington DC, we were discussing shalom as human flourishing and the conversation came around to Rabbi Jesus as a teacher of wisdom who emphasized shalom. Later, back home, while writing a magazine article about Jesus and politics, I wanted to include some thoughts about shalom and tikkun olam (the Hebrew phrase for “repairing the world”). But I was stuck. It’s never fun getting stuck when you are under a deadline!

Something was missing in my understanding of tikkun olam, so I shot off an email to Arnie. This led to a fascinating email conversation for a couple of days. The penny dropped for me when Arnie explained that the opposite of shalom is not violence or war but brokenness. “There is no shalom,” he said, “even if bullets are not flying, if hearts, minds, souls, or even dreams, are still broken. We, as God’s partners (according to Jewish theology) must help mend and repair the brokenness in the world.” That piece of wisdom helped me finish the article.

Tikkun olam (repairing the world) appears in many contexts in rabbinic literature and in Judaism for building Jewish societies of love, peace, justice, kindness, and generosity, and also for influencing the greater welfare of the world at large. (Some rabbis see the Sabbath as a kind of rehearsal for the coming for the messianic age of shalom, with the practice of tikkun olam during the preceding six days of the week as anticipating that future.)

I do not know if Jesus ever used the phrase tikkun olam, but its meaning sure seems to me to describe what he was on about as a teacher of wisdom during his itinerant ministry in the towns and on the hillsides of Galilee and Judea. You cannot read the Gospels without seeing Jesus continually urging his mixed audiences to get their act together> Jesus is frequently urging people to work more willingly and tirelessly to heal their relationships, love neighbor, and practice shalom in their communities. That might not repair the entire world, but it would repair the world around them. And that’s a pretty big deal.

Jesus was not being idealistic or utopian. Like the sages of old, he was realistic about human nature. He knew its limits and its penchant to turn ugly. Yet it is clear that Jesus’ gospel-shaped wisdom, even amid the highly-charged throes of the religious and political alchemy of Palestine under Roman rule, always meant putting away the sword. If there is any one first step toward the practice of shalom today, surely it is this.

Jesus oft-quote admonition to “put away the sword” came during his own end-times, just before his death on the cross. It hearkens back with perfect pitch to the beginning of his public ministry to what may be the most oft-quoted of Jesus’ words heard in the world today. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” Jesus said to what may well have been the largest mixed multitude ever assembled to hear him (Matthew 5:9).

The peace he spoke of on that mountainside was not that of the Pax Romana. Neither would it square with the Pax Americana of our time. It is the peace of shalom. Of repairing the world around us.

The agency of wisdom urges us in the here and now, amid our own diversity, to seek to repair adversarial or broken relationships and situations. It seems to me that if there is any first step toward that today, it must begin by putting away our swords, figuratively and literally, and become blessed peacemakers.

A note from Charles: For more of the perspectives that Waging Wisdom seeks to present, try following the blog for a while, to see if you like it. You can always unfollow anytime. Just click here, find the “Follow” button in the right margin, enter your email address, and click “Follow.” You will then receive a very short email notice when I post a new article. And, hey, if you like this stuff, tell a friend! Thank you.

A COMMUNITY PROJECT: MOODS & TUDES part 3 of 3

This is the third of three posts of personal stories that illustrate internal obstacles to following wisdom’s peaceable paths amid diverse cultures. The previous two posts focused on Christian – Muslim – Jewish relations in the larger context of U.S. – Middle East relations. But obstacles also exist, of course, outside of that context. So I thought we would look at one story about that here.

Personal struggles with the implications of actually following wisdom’s peaceable (shalomic?) paths amid human diversity is in fact everyone’s perennial challenge. We all know this. It is just sometimes hard to admit the truth of it. It is easy for the like-minded to be cool, calm, and collected among themselves. But what about when all different kinds of people are engaged in a community project to improve their neighborhood? Any hope there? In the context of community diversity, cooperation in proximity with others who do not look or sound or live as will be challenging.

When there is a community project that we are all trying to accomplish together, the challenge to be wise, productive agents of shalom in proximity of diversity may at times mean abandoning as unpromising some social or ideological, or even some religious, ways of thinking about other people that have become second nature to us. Especially when the implications of changing hit us. We may balk at that.

Some years ago an old friend of mine, Pastor Mike Osminski, and some of his friends, planted a church in an impoverished, mixed-race neighborhood on the border of Detroit. They had been part of a White, middle class suburban church, and they had a strong desire to “bring their resources” to help heal that broken neighborhood. They found a building near Eight Mile Road and things seemed to be going pretty well for the church’s mission until its embedded, White middle class religious views got in the way of furthering the reach of shalom. The church then faced the difficult choice of either holding to its existing theologically-driven values and practices and risk closing its doors or ditching the limiting bits of its religious views and do mission a different way.

It took them several painful years to sort this out, while the leaders chose to go with furthering shalom instead of hanging on to some question-begging theology – a situation further complicated when key people left the congregation. Making the changes was one thing; living out the implications of the changes for the church’s mission was quite another thing. It was only after the changes were made and their implications felt that some people balked and left.

Since then, however, the church’s mission has been having considerable, multi-dimensional impact on improving the neighborhood, including getting City Hall to pitch in. Further, in 2013, the church made the pages of Christianity Today as a key actor in a large and powerful network of urban and suburban Christians, called EACH (Everyone A Chance to Hear), which is working to bring shalom into many of Detroit’s impoverished neighborhoods through an impressive array of very practical initiatives.

Today, diversity in community has become more normative than ever, making the challenges to healing human brokeneness more demanding than ever. Like it or not, the world today holds all of us, each in our own way, inescapably in fulcrum of struggle through which, by our actions, we will be known either as wise or foolish.

Patience, humility, and prudence will be required when we are seeking to be empowered by wisdom to explore and develop ways of seeing and doing that are more pluralistically cooperative and peaceable. Efforts will be demanding and results often experimental. And it may take a long time, shepherded by carefully orchestrated effort, even to realize modest progress, especially amidst storms.

“BUT WHAT ABOUT?”: MOODS & TUDES part 2 of 3

This is the second of three posts of personal stories about internal obstacles that may inhibit following wisdom’s peaceable paths amid diverse cultures. The previous post contrasted two guest preachers in the context of Christian – Muslim – Jewish relations. This post sticks with that context to discuss what I call the “But what about?” objection.

I run across this dynamic frequently, and there are two kinds of it. One is the genuine kind. It is a response raised from someone who is seeking a good answer to the concern he or she has raised. It is often the next question in a chain of reasoning that a person is working through in hopes of breaking through to a wiser understanding of a situation, to gain a more informed opinion.

The other kind is, shall we say, disingenuous? This kind of “But what about?” objection is more of an interjection whose real purpose is simply to stop a conversation on a topic from going further. It’s a great ploy if it works. They party assumes that their “objection” carries the gravitas of a definitive case against your position, and that when you hear it you will understand this to be true – so what more need be said on the matter?

I run across both kinds in my work on improving Christian – Muslim and U.S. – Mideast relations. Here’s just one brief example, a typical one. But first this caveat. A “But what about?” objection is relative to the questioner’s intention. That is, is the “objector” seeking further enlightenment or merely intending to shut down further progress on the issue?

I once had a very long conversation with a financial counselor about how the wisdom norms of peaceableness and human mutuality could enable Christians and Muslims to dispel bad feelings and work together. It wasn’t an easy conversation. He was smart and pretty well-informed on Christian – Muslim tensions. He knew what the problems were, and he wasn’t sure if there were answers to them. I have had to work through these issues myself over the years, so as he posed the problems I answered them as best I could, by sharing how breakthroughs had occurred in my own thinking.

Toward the end of the conversation he seemed to be getting a bit uncomfortable and said, “But what about the Qur’an? It commands all Muslims to fight non-Muslims.” Well, as I said, we had been talking for a long time, and he tossed in that bombshell “objection” as we were winding it down. So I mumbled something like, “That’s huge issue. Let’s pick is up next time. I think I can answer it, but it would take too long to do properly that now.”

A few days a latter, I received an email from him, asking me to listen to certain a Web video because “it represents the view I hold.” So I listened. The video summarized, in a fairly scholarly way, actually, the notion, widespread in America, that the Qur’an commands all Muslims everywhere to practice violent jihad (war) against all non-Muslims, until Islam rules the world.

Videos like that one are not uncommon on the Internet. Now I am fully aware of the history of violent jihad and have written a major, journal article on it. I am not “soft” on this matter, and perhaps in some future posts we could discuss this. Here, I just want to say that the view promoted by that video omits talking about the countless Muslims around the world who do not turn to violence and war from their reading of the Qur’an, any more than Christians do from their reading of the Bible.

Further, many respected Muslim intellectuals, imams, and leading muftis are working very hard in their fields – in mosques, think tanks, universities, books, conferences, community projects, and international relations – and with Christian and Jewish leaders and organizations – to promote practices and projects for mutual good. Whether through ignorance of this or vested interests, however, the video I watched did not include anything about that either. It hardly needs to be said that these Muslims leaders are not relying on a violent understanding of Islam, the Qur’an, or shariah. And they have the ear of ordinary Muslims everywhere.

I mentioned all of this in my email reply to the financial counselor, and I said that these videos have contributed to a such a great fear of Muslims among many Christians that they have become afraid even to think about having a relationship with a Muslim. I concluded by saying that, as a Christian myself, I did not think that that was a gospel-shaped response. For at the logical end of that fear, even peace-loving people are left hanging on the horns of a dilemma: to choose between being conquered or to engage in violence or war to try to prevent being conquered. This is a classic example of the fallacy of a false choice – either one or the other unacceptable option.

If, then, a “But what about?” interjection remains unanswered, it may easily limit what can be peaceably imagined between people who are different, even by people who hate conflict and war and who want peace – even by people seeking wisdom.

TWO GUEST SPEAKERS: MOODS & TUDES part 1 of 3

Up until this point in this series of posts we have mainly discussed ideas. These ideas about wisdom as a vital agency of cooperation and peace (shalom) amid human diversity have been raising urgent questions about why we tend to limit the reach of wisdom to some people but not to others. For wisdom, according to Scripture, delights in “all humanity.”

Well, it’s one thing to agree mentally to an idea, but it can be quite another thing to put it into practice. So I thought it might be good to take a few posts and just share some personal stories that reveal internal challenges that may try to prevent following wisdom’s peaceable paths. As you read this first story, ask yourself: Which of the two guest speakers was obeying and which one was breaking the wisdom norms of peaceableness and mutuality? The answer may surprise you.

Let me take you inside a small, brick church in the American south. It’s a Sunday morning and I’m sitting quietly in a pew in the middle of the small congregation. I’ve been invited there to hear a guest preacher, just being introduced by the church’s pastor. And before I go on, you need to know that it is August 2010, the summer when that firestorm of controversy is raging across the country over the proposal to build “a mosque at ground zero,” in lower Manhattan.

The guest preacher begins his sermon with a moving personal story to introduce his topic, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslims or the mosque controversy. This could be a good message, I thought. Just minutes later, however, and without any sort of segue, he suddenly starts ranting about “the mosque at ground zero.” Then this bombshell: “I say, let them build it. Then when they’re done, let’s blow it up! That’s what they did to us on 9/11.”

I can’t believe my ears. And I don’t know what shocked me more, his statement or the “Amens!” that arouse around me when he said it. Livid, I come close to shouting out a rebuke. But then just as suddenly he stops ranting and returns to his sermon topic. I didn’t know what to do. Should I walk out? As I was pondering that, I had my mind made up for me. Suddenly he’s back ranting about the mosque and repeating his bombshell remark, which again drew some “Amens!” My heart pounding, I rise, step into the aisle, and walk quickly out, many people eying me.

I couldn’t just sit there and by doing nothing tacitly agree to what amounted to sponsoring a policy of violence. My knees were so wobbly I had a time walking to my car. I sat there in the heat for a long time, unable to drive.

After I cooled off, I wondered whether the guest preacher would change his mind if, for instance, he got to know Dr. Muqtedar Khan, an academic at the University of Delaware and a self-described liberal Muslim, whose editorial “Mr. Bin Laden: Go To Hell!” ran in dozens of newspapers around the world after 9/11. I also wondered what he would think about imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a peace-loving sufi Muslim who is well-respected for his decades of interfaith work in New York City and in the U.S. State Department, which occasionally sends him to the Middle East on public diplomacy jaunts.

Now let me take you to another religious meeting, a memorial service for Daniel Pearl at B’nai Jeshurun, a prominent Manhattan synagogue. Daniel is the Wall Street Journal writer who was kidnaped and beheaded in Pakistan by his al Qaeda-connected captors in February 2002, and it’s now a year later. Rays of sunlight are slipping through the arched, blue-toned stained-glassed windows of the sanctuary. Judea Pearl, Daniel’s father, is sitting attentively in the front row of the packed sanctuary, his eyes on the speaker, imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has been invited to the memorial service by Judea.

During his eulogy for Daniel, the imam turns to Judea and asks his forgiveness for what has been done to Daniel in the name of Islam. Rauf then adds: “If to be a Jew means to say with all one’s heart, mind, and soul Shma ? Yisreal, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Aha – Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One – not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl.” And to the Christians present, Rauf says: “If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind, and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one.”

This is the person that the guest preacher at the Sunday church service wanted to blow up. For imam Rauf, until 2011, was the lead visionary for the development of the multi-faceted, interfaith project in lower Manhattan that was manufactured into the ground zero mosque controversy. (For an in-depth account of the controversy and Rauf’s interfaith vision for the project, see Truth About the Mosque at Ground Zero. He hoped to model it somewhat after the multi-use, Jewish-run, 92nd Street Y.)

Attitudes toward others can oppose or encourage wise actions. Most Christian leaders, of course, would hate what the guest preacher said and agree with Jesus’s comment that “Wisdom is proved right by her actions” (Matthew 11:19). Some attitudes, of course, are on the surface, easily expressed. Others lay buried, and it may be a bit of a shock to discover that they are there. I want to share a story about that in the next post.

WISDOM AND HUMAN MUTUALITY part 5 of 5

These posts on wisdom and human mutuality have been raising urgent questions about why we tend to limit the reach of wisdom to some people but not to others. For we have been seeing what it means that wisdom, according to Scripture, delights in “all humanity.” As further evidence, the previous post looked at Lady Wisdom’s vital role for sustaining the unity-in-diversity of human life. She is, we concluded, a huge fan of human mutuality, not of uniformity or sameness. And she is an agency of shalom amid that diversity.

That wisdom is for all humankind is affirmed centuries later by Jesus, in Roman-occupied Palestine, where diverse cultures abounded. Today, it is usually Jesus’ roles as a healer, miracle worker, and savior that are emphasized. Of course he is also known as a teacher but, to our loss, little emphasis has been placed on Jesus’ rather significant role as a teacher of wisdom. If you are a Christian reading this, stop and think about this for a minute. When was the last time, or the only time, that you heard a sermon on Jesus as a wisdom teacher? I sometimes ask this question to congregations and classes; it is rare to see a hand go up. (Perhaps in some later posts we can spend some time looking at “Jesus the wisdom teacher.”)

Here, I just want to draw attention to a kind of riddle that Jesus makes about himself and John the Baptist. Jesus has been having a rather difficult time talking to a mixed audience that just doesn’t get John, and you can feel Jesus’ frustration building. He’s tried various ways to help them “get’ John, but to no avail.

To what shall I liken you, then? Jesus finally replies. You’re like silly children. We played dance music but you did not dance, so we played a funeral dirge but you did not mourn. John came fasting both wine and bread, like a holy, saintly man. But you say John has a demon. On the other hand, I’m eating and drinking and you say I’m a glutton, a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.

His frustration then boils over in a cryptic comment, which he leaves with the crowd to solve: “But wisdom is proved right [vindicated; justified] by all her children” (Luke 7:35).

If you want to know who can be seen responding wisely to wisdom, “Wisdom is proved right by her actions,” which is the way Matthew’s Gospel ends the riddle (11:19). Simply put, Jesus seems to be saying, look at what people do. This echoes a prominent teaching of Proverbs, that by their actions people will be known as being wise or foolish. One wonders if that crowd ever figured out that wisdom is available to all sorts of people, including sinners, apparently. As David Ford writes Christian Wisdom, an exceptionable book, wisdom has many children. To explain further, Ford notes that the little word “all” in Luke 7:35 stresses “the diversity of the children and how hard it can be to see the family likeness” (p. 15).

There is also this affirmation of wisdom in relation to human mutuality in the epistle of James, a letter attributed to a brother of Jesus: “If any of you is deficient in wisdom, let him ask God for it, who gives with open hand to all men” (1:5; Weymouth New Testament). This epistle carries so many features of the Hebrew wisdom tradition that its author, says wisdom scholar Ben Witherington, “has a commitment to a typical Wisdom agenda” (Jesus the Sage; p. 237.)

I think I’ve said enough for now, to get some conversation started, about the wisdom norms of peaceableness and human mutuality. See “Leave a reply,” below.

So far in this series of posts on the wisdom tradition, we have seen that its literature reveals wisdom as an agency of shalom (well-being, wholeness, flourishing) and of human unity-in-diversity. This has helped me immensely to understand why reliance on wisdom is a vital means to enable Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others to work cooperatively and peaceably together in their communities, nations, and international relations.

In the next few posts, I would like to move this discussion from the realm of ancient ideas to the contemporary street in order to illustrate some of the challenges that will be faced in our day when trying to actually implement wisdom’s peaceable (shalomic?) way.

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	Charles Strohmer (c)… on What’s going on in …

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