“A mocker seeks wisdom and doesn’t find it,
but knowledge comes easily to the perceptive.”
– Proverbs 14:6
We live in the Golden Age of Mockery. We’ve been conditioned to mock others for years by our entertainment, politicians, and media. Social media makes it incredibly quick, easy, and painless to like, share, tweet, comment, post, and repost material that mocks rather than seeking to understand, that drips with sarcasm rather than reflecting a genuine desire to be understood, and that dismisses serious issues through the “witty” application of the trivial and the distracting.
Hopefully you’ve noticed that we live in serious times and face serious issues! This isn’t the time for the people of God to rely on mockery to blind and numb themselves from truly understanding and responding to the grave challenges of this world with Christlike love, wisdom, and truth. Christ did not mock people even when He confronted and corrected their errors and sinfulness. Christ certainly never mocked the weak and the vulnerable – His sharpest words were always reserved for those in power who used that to ignore or distort the revealed will of God.
Take time to review your casual conversations with family, friends, and colleagues; review everything you’ve put out on social media; examine your own thoughts about what’s going on right now. Regardless of what position you take on the grave challenges of race, justice, law enforcement practices, public health, economics, government policy, and more, do your thoughts and words reflect a genuine desire to perceive and understand all sides of the issue and advance the conversation? Or do they simply reflect a reliance on mockery to avoid understanding?