Explosive! This is the way Jesus described the time in which he was living. He was feeling distressed, anxious. He knows that his mission will cause great upheaval due to the issues of the times. And yet he knew he had no choice but to carry it out.

The head-in-the-sand “amnesia” of Jesus’ contemporaries may seem odd to us now, but when one is in the midst of divisive upheaval, paradigmatic change, cultural shift, even within an atmosphere of oppression and revolution, that person often will, either consciously or unconsciously, not see it for what it is. When it comes to what’s going on around us, we tend to practice “selective comprehension.”

Critique is easy in retrospect. History is written after the fact. The present is not always easy to discern for us or to face head on.

It’s hum…