Revolutionary

Matthew 23:34 – “Therefore, see, I send you prophets, wise people, and lawyers and you will kill them and crucify them, you will scourge them in your synagogues and persecute them from town to town.”

Matthew’s Jesus was not messing around. The Pharisees and scribes were depicted as being the sons of their fathers in the previous verse. This verse lists the acts of their fathers and predicts that the Pharisees and scribes will do the same. These are the things that lead to misery.

If you’re anything like me, you read these verses and feel vindicated somehow. A little self-righteous. After all, we might think, I don’t kill or crucify or persecute people. We might feel that this verse exonerates us. And we’d be wrong. We’d be wrong because this list is not complete. These are the extremes of cruelty and bad behavior. It’s merely a question of degree. Lying, for instance. Lying in itself does serve a purpose. Sometimes we tell little white lies to let others save face or so their feelings aren’t hurt. These lies are usually harmless and serve to keep harmony. However, t is too easy to get carried away by our own lies, to go from lying to deception. Lies grow like snowballs rolling down a hill. As Sir Walter Scott (not Shakespeare) wrote, “What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

Yet, we’d also be wrong because there is a systemic, institutionalized nature to these things. We personally may not have killed or persecuted anyone, but if we are ‘white’ we certainly benefit from the actions of those that did in the past. We may not personally do terrible things, but our collective guilt is just as important as our individual guilt. Jewish culture is based on communal salvation rather than individual salvation. Jesus is calling out a group of people because, even though some of them may be innocent, they were not holding the guilty accountable.

Speaking of not being held accountable (yet), our current president recently told us to ignore the facts and believe him instead. Such lying and deception leads to killing, persecution, and lynching. We see this happening with Black people killed by police. We see it happening with the refugee families at the border. We see it happen every day with people calling Muslim people terrorists. Our president’s lies are harming our entire society. Although lies may seem harmless, words and actions can have very real consequences.

We are living in a country where our "leaders" are attempting to deceive us to save themselves. To the extent that we do not speak out against this, we are culpable. George Orwell wrote, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” 

Let’s be revolutionary.