Today’s first reading from the book of Wisdom, prophetically describes the way that Jesus Christ was viewed by the Jews of his time. The entire attitude in these verses is very similar to how many of the Jews treated Jesus. The Pharisees also wanted to test him:
“He claims to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a son of the Lord.”
“… and boasts of having God for his father.”
“Let us see if what he says is true … Let us test him with cruelty and with torture … Let us condemn him to a shameful death …”
“This is the way they reason, but they are misled, their malice makes them blind. They do not know the hidden things of God.”
This is exactly the same attitude that the Jewish people had when they condemned Jesus. But, the sad part is that they are not alone in doing so. We often judge people too, based on the few external facts we have about their lives. We judge and condemn people in our hearts sometimes, and often feel justified in doing so.
I spoke with a Jewish rabbi who is a chaplain at our prison this week, where I am a volunteer. He said that to this day, his people believes the authorities were justified in crucifying Jesus. They are still waiting on the messiah. He feels like the whole story of Jesus, who claimed to be the son of God, was built on lies and rumors. I was shocked to hear that he truly felt like Jesus deserved to be crucified. This Jewish rabbi has a heart as hard as a rock, when it comes to how he views Jesus Christ.
I asked him what the Jewish people believe about love. Is love necessary to have a good moral character, or to know God, or to gain eternal life? He said no. It is necessary to know God only through the mind, because it is through reason alone that you act. The heart does not matter. It follows the mind. He explained that Jews believe that they attain heaven by their birth right.
He also explained that to be a Jew, you had to be born into the Jewish faith through your mother. The mother must be Jewish in order for them to be Jewish. They do not seek converts and are against mixed marriages. They do not seek others to join their faith, but seem to live in a closed society of their own to this day.
No wonder God sent His only son to them! The Jewish people’s hearts were closed and hard like rocks. They judged and excluded others solely by the reasoning of their minds.
In the gospel today, we see this same attitude with Jesus. The Jews had known Jesus since he was a little boy. To them he wasn’t anything special. They knew his family, the people he came from. It was blasphemous that he claimed to be the son of God!
What their minds could not see though, was the hidden miracle of Christ’s birth. It was a hidden thing, that could not be proven in concrete, temporal facts. His divinity was hidden inside a flesh and blood body like their own.
Jesus’s divinity can only be known through the heart. When Jesus speaks in the gospels, it is our hearts that respond. When Jesus spoke to the sinners, outcasts, gentiles, and some of the Jews of his time, it was also their hearts that recognized the truth in what he said:
“My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.”
Yes, we can study the scriptures and come to know the Lord with our minds, but it is in our hearts that we know the truth for ourselves.
As we progress in our Lenten journey, it might be good for us to notice how we view other people during the course of our day. Do we assess them with just the external facts that we are aware of? Do we relate to others more with our mind?
Or do we make a conscious effort to see others like Christ does? To encounter them, with our heart?
Just like Jesus’s own life, there is so much more to every person’s story than what we see on the surface. No one wants to be judged on superficial things, (including ourselves). There are many things we do not understand about other people, but if we knew the whole story we might not judge them at all. Maybe during this Lenten season we could work on giving more people the benefit of the doubt? We do not know everything about their lives, and that is why God alone has the right to judge them. He alone knows their history, the truth about their lives, their motivations, and what is hidden in the deep recesses of their hearts.
