You Know a Tree by It’s Fruit

Summary

We human beings do not take responsibility for what we teach. We speak careless words motivated by self-interest and look the other way when our words—directly or indirectly—cause suffering in the world. It feels good to pretend that we are puzzled by gun violence in the United States, but we all know the truth. If we want to understand American violence, we need only look in the mirror: the teachings we feed our children are utterly corrupt and produce morally repugnant outcomes. In Scripture, the problem is easily resolved when we replace our words with the written words of God’s instruction. This is how we are made righteous in the Pauline gospel. When we say what we are commanded to say and it produces what God desires, then there is a chance that God, on that day, will decide that we are good (despite our wickedness) because we produced good out of the good treasure of his written wisdom. Richard and Fr. Marc discuss Matthew 12:33-37. Episode 296 Matthew 12:33-37; Music from https://filmmusic.io: “Lost Time” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)