March 10, 2025 - Good Morning! It’s Monday, March 10.
We wake this morning to a world filled with division, to a culture characterized by the drawing of battle lines instead of the search for common ground. People with different views or backgrounds are too often reduced to negative stereotypes, turned into caricatures that can easily be derided and dismissed. It is a culture that threatens to consume us.
This depiction of our present world would also aptly describe the world of the New Testament. But in those pages we find a different point of view, a different way to live, and we get a glimpse of that philosophy when we look at the men that Christ chose to be His disciples. I turn the spotlight on two of those men - Matthew the tax collector and Simon the Zealot. In the Jewish culture of the 1st Century you would have been hard pressed to find two people more different, more disconnected, more in opposition.
As much as the Romans were hated by the Jews, the Jewish tax collectors were hated even more. They were seen as self serving bureaucrats. They were seen as traitors. And what group in that culture would have hated the tax collectors the most? The Zealots. They actively conspired to overthrow the Romans, and often used violence as a tool. If a Zealot and a tax collector entered a dark alley, it was quite probable that only one man would exit.
How amazing it is that Jesus would choose these two men, choose them to live and walk and work together for three years, choose them to be a team. The methods and the philosophy of Christ must have seemed ridiculous to his contemporaries, must have seemed idealistic, foolish, and naive. But these two men, these twelve disciples, would go on to change the world.
A different point of view. A different way to live. Two thousand years ago... and today.
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
