Irrational Faith

Daily Meditation for Friday June 13, 2014

John 1:43-46

"The next day Jesus decided to leave for Galilee. Finding Philip, he said to him, “Follow me.”
Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”  “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”Nathanael asked."

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"Can anything good come from there."

It seems like racism and all kinds of prejudice are on the rise.  The victory of overtly racist parties in the European Union, racial slurs from basketball team owners and celebrity chefs.  Race-based mass killings by white supremacists and anti-Semites.  The fact that judgmental prejudice and outright racism is alive and well in our culture is evident from a mere scanning of the daily paper.  Jesus was no stranger to that.

Nathaniel exhibits one of the first ethic prejudices in the New Testament.  Nazareth was not only a poor little place, (for so Bethlehem also was), but a place which the Scripture never mentioned as the place from whence the Messiah should arise; a place that God had not honoured with the production of a prophet. It was a place of no account.  The other side of the tracks.  If Jesus came from such a non-descript, no account place, can he, his family, his message be of any value?  

Rightly did Herbert Spencer proclaim that,  “There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation.”

But we often do engage in "contempt prior to investigation."  Against people of other religious traditions; against people who are divorced and remarried.  Against persons of a different political party.  Against those who have experienced the horror of a terminated pregnancy.  Against those with same sex attraction or who are a different, color, race or creed.  Against those who like Jesus who are from "the other side of the tracks."

What is your prejudice?  Who is different from you that you are judging?  Can you get to empathically know them long enough to walk a mile in their shoes?



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