Pipes and Dirges

To what then shall I compare the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children who sit in the market place and call to one another, and they say, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.' For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, 'He has a demon!' The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' But wisdom is proved right by all her children. (Luke 7:31-35)

Never be childish, but always be childlike in your faith. As I see, Jesus asks us to grow and mature in our faith, to be able to read the signs of the times. God reveals himself in various ways: surprising and shocking ways. Gallagher writes: “Balthasar and Sequeri insist particularly on the shocking differentness of Christian revelation. It is interruption, rupture, excess. Its climax in Cross and Resurrection takes us beyond all human logic.” (Faith Maps 154.) Some Pharisees and leaders at the time of Jesus were not able to understand or see God’s hand in the extremities of a John the Baptist or a Jesus of Nazareth. God reveals to us and speaks to us in strange ways. Whether in a drunkard or a glutton or a person out of his mind. God’s ways are unfathomable. To conclude, as Sathish writes in his gospeltoons (reflections-cum-cartoons on the day’s gospel passage): “Don’t be arrogant or ignorant,” unless we are open to the divine strangeness around us, we may land up being arrogant or proud or childishly ignorant, or just plainly immature.