Wednesday in the 24th Week of Ordinary Time, September 26, 2020

Luke 7:31-35

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

Long ago, when children still played outside, they often played games that featured calls, or call-and-response.  These games included “Red Rover”, “Marco Polo”, “Ring Around the Rosie”, and various rope skipping rhymes.  The ancestors of these games go back as far as history allows us to see.  The Lord Jesus alludes to one of these games in today’s Gospel reading.  Perhaps it is a game the Lord himself played in his childhood.  What it comes down to is to cause someone, maybe a child who was “it”, as in the game of tag, to behave in a certain way.  This would make it akin to “Simon Says”.  The Lord refers to the game in order to point out to the people around him that they were not truly seeking to learn from him, particularly concerning his identity, so much as they were trying to impose an identity on him and so control his words and deeds.  The Lord rebukes them for this, and in so doing tells them that they are acting childishly.

“The people of this generation.”  The Hebrew word for “generation” is dor, and like its Greek equivalent, it has a more general meaning than the one we usually associate with the English word.  Dor could mean generation as in a period of forty years), or an age, or a cycle of time.  The Jews of the time of Jesus believed that they were living in the sixth age, that of the Messiah; the seventh age being the age of the Sabbath.  The early Christians adapted this, understanding the sixth age, or generation, as beginning with the Incarnation of Jesus Christ and concluding with the end of the world and the final judgment.  The resurrection of the just and their entrance into heaven would inaugurate the seventh age or eternal Sabbath.  Jesus is speaking here of this sixth age, which continues to the present time.  The people of “this generation” attempt to interpret him according to their ideas, conceits, ideologies, cultural norms, and even their own personal sinfulness.  Many seek in Jesus a political liberator, a mere heroic example, a wise man, a misunderstood prophet, a wandering story-teller, or a man as sinful and given to weaknesses as any of us.  So few these days (or any other days) seek to understand him as he knew himself to be.  This requires, among other things, setting aside all preconceptions and foreign cultural prisms — indeed, our pride.  More than anything else, it is this pride that makes Jesus so hard for people to know.  Only the little ones, the child-like, can know him well.  The merely childish cannot.

“For John the Baptist came neither eating food nor drinking wine, and you said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ ”  In preparation for the feast of grace the Lord would bring when he came, John and his disciples fasted often.  They fasted to such a degree that people felt intimidated, and so they accused him, at least among themselves, of being “possessed by a demon”.  But the people seeing that the Lord and his disciples did not fast, said, “Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.”  In this way, they also let themselves off the hook: Fasting is bad, just look at that John the Baptist fellow; and, There is no need for us to talk with sinners so as to bring them back, just look at that Jesus of Nazareth character.

So let us throw off our pride and learn who Jesus truly is, which we can do through the study of the Gospels and through gazing at him on the crucifix and at the altar.