Ideas in conflict

The texts today from the Roman CatholicLectionary offer us some sobering reflection on how we are mislead by our slavery to our ideas and our personal position to act in ways completely foreign to the Way of Life. Yeshua Ben Sira, Jesus son of Sirach, was a scribe living and teaching in Jerusalem a couple of centuries before the birth of Jesus who,Friar Jude Winkler tells us, was writing to show, in part, that Jewish philosophers and heroes were every bit as great and powerful as the Greek persons who were promoted during the dominance of Hellenistic rulers and culture in the region. The elegy today to David is not an historically balanced account of his rule. As Friar Jude notes, it omits any reference to the murderous and adulterous transgressions of King David. The difference of opinion between King Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, and John the Baptist, who is portrayed in the Gospel of Mark today as being of interest to Herod as a holy man with challenging ideas, means he is beheaded as a consequence of a series of actions in which a hasty promise is carried out so that Herod may not lose face among his courtiers. The Wisdom, which in our religious tradition has been so treasured, vanishes as we rush to defend concepts, ideas and assumptions which we hold very tightly. A recentmessage of Pope Francis to world youth asks them to focus for this year on the happiness which is ours when we adopt the lifestyle of the Beatitude which exhorts us to be poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3) and to know the Kingdom of God. The pope links the poverty of spirit to the description of Jesus to the Philippians as the One who emptied himself (Philippians 2:1-11). Pope Francesco invokes the life of his namesake, the Poor Man of Assisi as one who embraced poverty of spirit. In the recent action of the Pope to reach out to Muslim believers he is acting, according to Dr. Akbar Ahmed, a foremost Islamic scholar, in the tradition of St Francis who befriended a Muslim Sultan during the Crusades. It is difficult for us to open our mind. A simple illustration is in the comment from Eileen Wirth of Creighton University about the difficulty Catholic liturgists have with the life and joy in simple congregational singing that we find as a witness to life in Protestant communities. The sobering reality of violence rooted in a clash of ideas is offered a counterbalance of happiness for those who are poor in spirit.