Friday in the Second Week of Advent, December 11, 2020

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.”

It is a sign of the how complete was the disaster of the Fall of Man that the display of miracles and powerful preaching can become dull to us.  For an angel or a deeply spiritual follower of Christ, the most ordinary natural things provide the experience of the glory of God.  But most of us are distracted easily or lack interest in anything beyond our personal lives.  When the extraordinary does occur, we try to rationalize it or minimize it, perhaps thinking to evade its consequences.  We cling to complacency as to a warm coat on a bitter night.  Even the proximity of the source of the miraculous ceases to amaze us over time.  We have our lives to live, routines to follow, pressing personal concerns to attend to.  As the Lord Jesus puts it, “They were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage” even while Noah labored in their midst and his ark cast a shadow over their city while the sun still shone.  

We see this in the Gospel reading for today’s Mass.  The people no longer wonder at the wondrous deeds of the Lord and view him as they would any other man, measuring him by others and according to their criteria for what he should be doing.  Jesus confronts the people with their childish attitude by likening them to children in the marketplace, running about and playing while the adults engage in the serious work of buying and selling wheat and wine, exchanging news, contracting workers.  The children are oblivious to all this, involved as they are in their little worlds.  Jesus even quotes the words to one of their song-games: “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.”  The mothers of these children could easily have quoted this back to them when they disobeyed.

“For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ ”  People became accustomed to John the Baptist’s signs of rigorous fasting and abstention from wine.  For many, he himself had become a mere curiosity.  His calls to repentance had faded to background noise.  He was part of the local scenery.  The severity of his life was easily explained: He was 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.’ ”  And this was all he was to so many, a man who attended too many dinners thrown by the wrong sort of people.  He came and stayed in town for a few days, there was a bustle of activity, and then he left, to return another time.  His miracles of healing were not accompanied by special effects and often occurred outside the towns, where the lepers crouched, or were done for the lame or blind who lay alongside the street, forgotten or ignored.

“But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”  Jesus reflects on the public reaction with words that can be understood in two ways.  First, the Lord cast his good works and words as seeds, knowing full well the various responses they would receive.  Many seeds would fall on unsuitable ground, but rich ground was out there.  Lives would change, sometimes all at once as in the case of the Apostles, and sometimes gradually, as in the case of men like Nicodemus.  The wisdom, then, of his ministry would be borne out by the Saints who resulted from it.  Second, Jesus himself is the Word, the Wisdom, of the Father.  He himself, then, is “vindicated” by his Saints, by their witness unto death.  This “vindication” means for a person’s assertion to be proven to be true.  The witness of the Lord’s holy ones down through the ages prove him to be Truth itself.  These are the ones who did not lose themselves in their ordinary lives but who pondered and wondered when they encountered him whether in person, in prayer, or through good example.  We pray for the gift of doing as they did:

“Stir up our hearts, O Lord, to prepare the ways of Your only-begotten Son, so that through His coming we may be able to serve You with purified minds. Who livest and reignest with God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end.”  — Collect Prayer for the Sixth Day of the Second Week of Advent, from the 1962 Roman Missal.