Here's the way I translate today's readings about the superior ways of those (like China) whom we routinely despise as foreign and inferior. You can find their original forms here to see if I've got them right.
Jonah 3: 1-5, 10: The reluctant prophet Jonah braved Nineveh's hostile urban jungle to announce Yahweh's urgent call for Israel's Great Enemy to change its entire unjust system. The patriotic seer was greatly chagrined when the enemy actually listened, changed completely and transformed its destructive way - in just 40 days.
Psalm 25: 4-9: So, Great Mother-Father, teach us the way of the Ninevites. For the enemy's path of justice, humility, love, kindness, good, truth and compassion is your way too.
I Corinthians 7: 29-31: Our time for such willing social transformation is quickly running out. Choosing it is more important than sex, our little trials and triumphs, our trinkets, and work. But thankfully, our Great Father-Mother's drastically New World is inevitably assured.
Mark 1: 14-20: Yeshua recognized that inevitability after conservative forces arrested his mentor, the Great prophet, John the Baptist. Ordinary workers with simple names like Simon, Andrew, James and John saw it too. So, they left everything: work and companions, father and mother, wives and lovers. They joined Yeshua's working class movement for the sake of Good News for laborers like themselves about the Great Mother-Father's in-breaking New Order.
Conclusion
Like Yahweh in the days of Jonah and Jesus centuries later, the Spirit of Life today is calling us in so many ways to repent and imitate the equivalents of Jonah's Ninevites. Like Paul in Corinth, the Great Mother-Father tells us that the time is short. Climate chaos itself underlines that urgent message. Our task is more important than anything our culture presents as essential.
China's example of repentance, its departure from capitalism-as-we-know-it, its construction of an economy based above all on meeting the needs of its huge population, represents a path forward - if not for imitation, for inspiration and instruction.
It tells us that we must reorient away from profits and wealth for the few towards the creation of a society with room for everyone and abundance for all - just what the working man, Yeshua, demonstrated in his choice of working-class people to introduce the Kingdom's new heaven and new earth.
We're called today to listen to the prophets of such unconventional wisdom rather than to Pompeo and Blinken's misdirection.
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