“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” Matt 5:5
The Sermon on the Mount and the resurrection are the two bookends of Jesus theology. He asks us to look at the world in a different way. Instead of equating material might with righteousness, He says that humility and meekness will overcome pride and strength. It may seem counterintuitive, but we have just witnessed another example of this truth.
The recently concluded Mideast peace summit at Annapolis was a gathering of politically weak leaders. It couldn’t have happened even as little as a year ago because each of these leaders had a different agenda when they felt they were in control of their own destiny.
Israel’s Olmert has been accused of numerous corruption scandals and is also battling prostate cancer. His approval rating in Israel is in single digits.
Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas is even worse. In the last election his government lost to Hamas. The only reason he has a position at all is that the United States and Israel refused to acknowledge the democratically elected Hamas government as legitimate.
Then we’ve got President Bush. He is in the last year of his administration with very little to show for his time in office. His approval rating remains in the low 30’s. The surge seems to have produced some stability, but there is little evidence that the Iraqi government is going to be able to govern. At the same time the Taliban and bin Laden both appear to be regaining strength. Pakistan is a powder keg. Iran is talking about a nuclear bomb. North Korea has been sharing its nuclear secrets with Syria. The sub-prime mortgage crisis continues to wreak havoc with the economy. The dollar is weak. The debt is staggering. His own party appears to be running away from him, and Al Gore just got a Nobel for rejecting the Bush environmental policy.
Yet in this weakness, there is strength. For this country, that strength is the recognition that we can’t bend the rest of the world to our will. It is a tacit admission that our “go it alone” policy is a failure. It is also the recognition that we are not going to defeat bin Ladinist Islam until there is some resolution of the issues surrounding the creation of Israel.
It isn’t clear if the talks begun in Annapolis will yield anything of substance. What is clear is that meekness was the needed element to get this process started. That’s because when pride and ego are replaced by meekness and humility, people stop telling and start listening. When they start listening, God speaks to them. What they hear is how they can advance God’s ever-present plan that all his children live in peace.
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on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 12:22 am and is filed under Politics.
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