Jesus has been healing people in many villages but not in his own. Locals question why he can’t “do (healing) here in your native place.” Jesus proposes it is their lack of faith. He names two Gentiles from their Old Testament stories who, unlike them, did believe and were healed. “When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and forced him to the brow of the hill… to hurl him down headlong. But Jesus passed through the midst of them.”
The people in the synagogue did not tend toward healing and instead toward violence. They doubted healing as it flowed from a person or in a form new to them, but they believed in violence as it was mandated by their Old Testament. A mandate means to give an official command. Mandates are set down by the religion of Militarism, whose adherents devised much of the Old Testament. It is replete with tyrants, dictators who rule at the point of a sword and sanctify descendants ruling from the barrel of a gun. The tyranny of Militarism and its mandates are evident in our time. One obvious mandate routinely complied with is Selective Service. Selective service mandates all 18 year old males register with the government enabling their being drafted into war. The young men are trained into violence, to be tyrants themselves who dictate from the barrel of a gun. Failure to register results in a tyrannical government doing violence to the young men, such as fines and jail time. Violence is the ethic by which the State routinely operates and young men routinely comply. Occasionally, a government will mandate action that is not overt physical violence. For example, it is possible for a government to mandate schooling. Schooling for education is a common good. We grow together as we experience and think about the diversity and artistry of our human family. We become more compassionate together as we learn of the courage and wisdom of friends and people we thought were our enemies. We learn how to be creative together when assaulted by harm and act to heal it. It is important to distinguish between schooling for education and schooling for tyranny. Schooling for tyranny will prohibit experiencing and thinking about diversity and artistry, like forbidding The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory. It will diminish compassion because it segregates us by status, like using property taxes to fund schools and hindering schooling for Southern border and Afghan refugees. Schooling for tyranny will stifle creative thinking and living to heal harm because it instead foments violence through unsubstantiated beliefs and unfounded speculation, like starting a war against Iraq and rejecting proven health initiatives. Schooling for tyranny produces tyrants who oppose even mask recommendations as tyrannical, while they mandate their right to dictate tyranny from the barrel of a gun. It can be argued that all mandates, from the government or from these gun toting individuals, are military mandates and should be opposed. But is one arguing that perspective having been schooled for education or having been schooled for tyranny? Does one oppose mandates because one is living from conscience or because one is inventing contrived victimhood and its vengeance? It is precisely those persons who have been schooled in tyranny that hinders thinking, diminishes compassion, and stifles creativity who are responsible for exacerbating a pandemic that is resulting in the government currently considering a health mandate. People schooled in tyranny are the cause of their own problem. Worse, they are the cause of this society’s problem. Their own projected complaints of tyranny prevent society’s true healing of misery. They are a match to the tyrants in the Gospel furious over Jesus’ healings who responded to him with violence. They too tend toward violence – against modern day healers – directing death threats and worse against doctors and nurses, especially those in public health. Do we have the courage, like Jesus, to “walk through the midst of them?”
“Oh! soul, strum with every pulse, strings of wisdom… Learn the ways of the sage, inspire hate to seek amends… Engage with humility… time will not bend to your will Neither can you command a nightingale not to sing Strive to embrace divinity, be a messenger of peace Oh! Soul.” (Oh Soul – Vijay Pandit)
Prayer: Spirit, guide us to be healers in this world.
Question: How can I best engage with tyrants to help them act for healing?
January 30, 2022 Gospel Luke 4:21-30 Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time