Friday in the Second Week of Advent, December 9, 2022

Matthew 11, 16-19

Jesus said to the crowds: “To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”

The Lord addresses the crowds quoting a children’s call-and-response song, thereby pointing up their own childishness.  While his words may sound as though motivated by frustration, the Lord is simply teaching the people not to impose their false ideas of the Messiah on him.  The idea of a savior becomes concrete in the later Prophets although even in Genesis, with the hindsight given to us by the Faith, we can see it’s beginnings.  But the Prophets only mention this savior, and not very often.  We learn relatively little, except that God will raise him up to restore Israel.  Isaiah speaks also of a suffering servant who will bear the sins of the world, but the savior of Israel is not explicitly connected with this mission.  With the death of the last Prophet, Israel entered into a period of four hundred years in which God sent no prophets.  And since the priests in Jerusalem neither preached nor authorized preaching, lay people began to study the Scriptures on their own and to put together various doctrines they derived from them.  Thus, groups like the Pharisees and Sadducees emerged, each firmly convinced of its own teachings, though not in any way reviewed and passed by those in authority.  The Pharisees believed in a political deliverer such as they found in the scattered verses of the Prophets, but did not know what to do with Isaiah’s description of a suffering servant — and his identity divides Jewish scholars today.  It does not even seem to have occurred to the Pharisees to try to connect the two concepts: the savior of Israel and the one on whom the Lord would lay the sins of the world.  And so they insisted on one and turned a blind eye on the other.  

The crowds, taught by the Pharisees, expected Jesus of Nazareth, who had shown himself powerful in word and in deed, to lead the resurgence of the nation and they were prepared to join him in his march on Jerusalem.  The Lord insisted to them that he was not what they so narrowly thought, never even allowing others to speak of him as the Messiah and never claiming the title for himself, rather choosing to refer to himself as  “the Son of man”.  And so he speaks to the crowds here of their false expectations: “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.”  He would not conform himself to their picture of who they wanted him to be.  In particular, he speaks of how they had misunderstood John the Baptist before him: “For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ ”  Interestingly, this reveals that not all of the people of Israel appreciated John, that he was criticized by at least a segment of the population, and perhaps only during a certain time.  But it was a serious matter to charge someone with being possessed by a demon.  It was a contemptuous rejection.  But what had John done to earn this?  He had lived as the Prophets of old had lived: neither eating nor drinking alcohol, living simply, and preaching repentance.  Now did he travel through the cities and towns preaching, but stayed out by the Jordan 

River, letting the people come to him.

Jesus, by contrast, “came eating and drinking and they said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ ”  And, in order to explain the power Jesus had to cast out demons, some said that he himself was possessed, or at least cast out demons by the help of the prince of demons.  The Lord uses these criticisms and accusations made at him by others to show the crowds present before him that they misunderstood him too, though in a different way.  He also provides an implicit warning.  By dismissing John the Baptist out of hand as “possessed”, many people missed their opportunity not only to repent, but to hear and meet “the greatest man born of woman”, as the Lord called him; and that similarly, many would fail to save themselves from hell by refusing to believe who Jesus explained over and over again he truly was.

The Lord pauses after making his points before adding, “But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”  “Wisdom” here is God’s providential plan for the salvation of the world.  It is “vindicated” by those who truly seek the truth without regard to their own opinions and expectations, finding the truth; and those who only want to find justification for their own ideas and opinions, not finding the truth.

You and I have been washed in the Truth through our baptisms.  Let us remain clean from sin and ignorance so that we might embrace him more and more fully, setting aside all that is not true.