Photo Credit: Reuters.com/Kacper Pempel
November is the last month of the Church year. Sunday’s gospel comes from near the end of Luke’s gospel. Jesus’ long journey to Jerusalem that begins in Luke 9.51 is over. He arrives in the city in chapter 19. Many turn out to welcome him. Then Jesus cleanses the temple and causes an uproar.
The temple courtyards are Jerusalem’s central public space. People come to the temple to pray and interact with each other. Jesus comes to the courtyard each day to teach. His actions in the temple stir up opponents. Other teachers, priests, and leaders want to debate Jesus on the hot religious topics of the day.
This Sunday, some conservative Sadducees make an extreme cases of observing one of Israel’s 613 laws in order to argue resurrection is ridiculous. The law obligates a surviving brother to marry his widowed sister-in-law if the brother dies without fathering an heir.
Jesus shows himself a skilled rabbi, able to interpret and argue from Israel’s scriptures. In Jewish tradition, learning is communal. Students question, argue, debate with one another.
Questions invite curiosity and broaden thinking. Conversations can even transform us.
Talking about politics challenges us to keep conversation civil and constructive. Some of us get shushed to preserve friendships and family relationships. But democracy and Catholic social teaching require thinking together, hearing more than ourselves, and learning the needs of people left out.
The Second Vatican Council emphasizes the common good, “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (Church in the Modern World #26).
The common good requires the hard work of weighing and balancing competing needs. It’s work in which we must all participate. “Every group must take into account the needs and legitimate aspirations of every other group, and even those of the human family as a whole” (#26).
- What points of view besides your own have you learned to take seriously?