Daily Lesson for December 11, 2015

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Matthew chapter 23 verses 29 through 31:

29 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous,30 saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets."

Earlier this summer as I made my way into the city centre of Oxford, England for the very first time, I was taken by a monument which has defined the downtown square since its erection in 1843.  It is the Martyrs' Memorial, dedicated to three 16th-century martyrs burned at the stake outside the old city wall, just a few hundred feet from where the monument now stands.

It is a perpetual human condition that one generation murders the prophets and the next builds their monuments. We see this not only in the Oxford City Centre but also on the National Mall in Washington, DC with its monuments to President Lincoln and Dr. King, and in thousands of other places around the world.

One generation sees the prophets as a threat to civil order and as corrupters of the morals of the youth and their murder is a sanctioned event, if not by the explicit law of the state then surely by the implicit mores of its time and culture. The prophets are seen as a threat to the current generation's sense of common decency and sacred values.

The next generation apologizes for the murders and dedicates a monument to the victims.

Knowing this history should give us all pause.  It's a call to wisdom -- which is oftentimes at best a self-conscious understanding that we as human beings have historically had and still have a really difficult time knowing good from evil.

Which brings me to the last words of one of Wisdom's great prophets killed by his own generation, Socrates: "All I know is that I know nothing." If only we could all be so less sure.

Monuments like the one in Oxford remind us of what courage and cost it can take to swim against the tide; and they're a reminder also that the tides can change.

#martyrsmemorial #MallonWashington #DeepWisdomCourageousFaith