Wisdom is that by which men persevered in the face of
wickedness, wisdom is righteousness, living according to the precepts of
God. Has that changed since Jesus? Habakkuk wrote it, Paul picked up on it and
Luther re-discovered the truth that the just or righteous shall live by faith
and so we shall. Jesus is our
righteousness, not our works which are, as Paul says, no more than filthy rags
even for the best of us. This passage
speaks of many which it calls “righteous” and some certainly rise above the
rest but are they truly “righteous.”
Jesus is the only righteous man who ever lived in the sense that He kept
the law perfectly, did not sin. Many of
these in this list sinned in ways that we are told about yet righteous is the
word used for them. If you look at the
list a second time what you will discover is that these all were, as the writer
of Hebrews wrote, men of faith whose faith was the wisdom that kept them safe,
delivered them from evil, and made them truly noteworthy.
Certainly it would have been odd for this traveling band of
disciples to have included a group of women, particularly women who “had been
healed of evil spirits and infirmities.”
We know from the short list Luke provides that the women who followed
the group included a royal official’s wife, indicating that the message and
ministry of Jesus attracted attention at the highest levels of society. As we have just looked at a passage where a
woman we feel certain is a prostitute ministered to Jesus, we can see that His
ministry reached up and down the social ladder.
That women were accepted into the group indicates that they would have
also been there for teaching, a very different attitude from the culture, they
would have been part of the group that heard this parable, and many teachers
would have believed that they were incapable of learning, perhaps thinking of
them as the poor soil of the parable. We
should examine our attitudes towards others in light of the indiscriminate work
of the sower in the parable, perhaps we sow only where we think it might be
profitable in bearing fruit.
The renewing of the mind begins with accepting the
resurrection of Jesus, accepting that He alone in all of history is worthy of
being the first person to be resurrected.
That truth leads to a sober reflection on ourselves doesn’t it? Paul writes that we are “not to think of
himself more highly than he ought to think.”
For some that isn’t a problem while for others it is a great stumbling
block. The church often makes too much
of some gift or other and when we do, we devalue the other gifts. Some church cultures exalt the teacher, some
the musicians, some the prophets, in some the gift of tongues is seen as the be
all, end all and those who do not possess this gift as lesser, even suspect
Christians. In the end, Paul says that
the only mark of a true Christian is love, keeping the new commandment Jesus
gave at the Last Supper.
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