Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there.
Talk about mercy. The daughter of Pharoah, the ruler who had ordered the death of all Hebrew male infants, was moved enough by the sight of Moses in the bulrushes that she risked her father’s wrath and saved the baby’s life. It makes us feel 
warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it, to think that a woman with so odious a father had such tender feelings for someone she was supposed to hate?
Jesus, however, is less than warm and fuzzy when he talks about the unrepentant towns, the very places where he had done so much of his work. It’ll be worse for you at the end than Sodom, he says in Matthew 11, and we all know how despicable Sodom was with its ruthless raping and pillaging and lack of regard for the most basic of respect for other human beings.
The difference, perhaps, is in the awareness that something greater than the temple of ourselves is at work her. Pharoah’s daughter recognized it in rescuing Moses. She recognized the value of a human life, regardless of her father’s edicts, regardless of the fact that the baby was not an Egyptian. The land of Sodom did not and, even worse, Capernaum did not recognize the Lord when He was in their midst.
Do we?
