JESUS COMMUNICATED

If we read the four Gospels, we find that Jesus was a man who liked to communicate with others without setting down preconditions. When he was 12 years old, Mary and Joseph searched for him for three days and finally found him in the Temple teaching the rabbis. When Mary reprimanded him, he asked. “Did you not know that I must be about my father’s business?”

He talked to children, fishermen, tax collectors, Samaritans, scribes and Pharisees, wedding guests, prostitutes, lepers, swineherds, centurions, paralytics, thieves, demoniacs, farmers, Canaanites, and both the elite and the dregs of society. And he attended wedding banquets without any preconditions. King Herod was the only person he would not answer when Herod addressed a question to him.

So where am I going with this? Well I am addressing those critics of Senator Barack Obama who have said that he should not communicate with the enemies of our country without first setting down preconditions for the meeting. Let it be clear that I am not putting Obama on a par with Jesus.

Jesus did not set down preconditions for a meeting with the scribes and Pharisees, but that does not mean that he did not prepare himself for those meetings. That does not mean that he ignored their history. He knew it well, but he was willing to listen to their arguments and their questions.

Obama should meet with the president of Iran, for example, but that does not mean he should ignore the acts of this nefarious tyrant. It means that he should listen to what he has to say about the Middle East and our presence in that region.

After WW II, the United States enjoyed tremendous prestige among most of the nations and peoples of the world. Rightfully so. Our armed forces liberated the world from the madness and insanity of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. We showed the world the brutality, hatred and atrocities suffered by millions of Jews in the Holocaust and vowed that such genocide would never happen again. The people of the United States have generously shared their wealth, their crops, their technology with millions of poor people and nations of the world.

So why have we lost our international prestige and standing in the world? Is it greed and arrogance caused by our giant military industrial complex which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us not to build? Is it hubris? The kind that led us to lose 58,000 military men and women in the Vietnam War? The kind that led us to lose thousands more in Iraq?

That’s what our next president must find out. Not by speaking softly and carrying a big stick as President Theodore Roosevelt suggested. But by listening quietly and respectfully. Not by setting preconditions that exclude the very issues that need to be discussed.

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