Saturday,
5/17/14
The first
reading shows the Jewish believers, who at first were delighted with Paul’s
stories about Jesus, being filled with jealousy when Paul’s message was
accepted by Gentiles. That
jealousy led them to use violence against Paul and Barnabas, driving them from
the city.
We know that
to be sincere in or worship of the Father in heaven, we must show love toward
all of his human, but how often we fail in this?
There is a
logical basis for religious and racial prejudice. It is rooted in ages when men
hunted other men the way some men hunt animals. In Genesis 4:14 when his crime became
known, God punished Cain by making him a wanderer. Cain objected, “If I
must become a wanderer on the face of the earth, anyone may kill me at sight.”
In Europe’s
Black Plague between 1446 and 1449 Paris lost half its number, England’s population dropped from five
to two million. The Jews lost a hundred
villages, but the plague was responsible for only half of the losses. The
others were destroyed by Christians blaming the Jews for the plague.
Mankind has
progressed a little since then. We can travel abroad with the proper visas, but
every day we run up against inhuman prejudices. Today’s paper has a case of a
girl in northern Sudan sentenced to death for apostasy by refusing to return to
Islam from Christianity. A right wing anti-Jewish party is gaining strength in
Germany. The Israel-Palestinian peace talks have come to an end with Jewish
construction on land they had previously agreed to be Palestinian.
We have our
own struggles at overcoming prejudice. I remember times when I offered friends
a ride in my car rather than have them ride a bus with black people. Now I have
no car, and many black people on buses are good friends. Even so, I still find
remnants of prejudice with deep roots inside of me.
We never see prejudice for what it is. As a teenager I had thought it right
that blacks should not be allowed in our theaters. I believed in segregated
schools. St. John wrote that anyone who hates a brother man whom he can see
cannot really love God, whom he cannot see. So?
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