December 15, 2017 Friday, 2nd Week of Advent
1st Reading: Is 48:17–19Gospel: Mt 11:16–19
Jesus said to the crowds, “Now, to what can I compare the people of this day? They are like children sitting in the marketplace, about whom their companions complain: ‘We played the flute for you but you would not dance. We sang a funeral song but you would not cry!’“For John came fasting and people said: ‘He is possessed.’ Then the Son of Man came, he ate and drank, and people said: ‘Look at this man! A glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet the outcome will prove Wisdom to be right.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the
Assimilated Life
Experience)
People never do things right in the eyes of God. This was what Jesus wanted to point out when he described the people of his time as children who are unresponsive to appropriate stimuli and conditions. The incapacity of those people was not due to impairment of the senses but to too much preoccupation with the desires of the flesh. “Now, to what can I compare the people of this day?” Jesus asked. “They are like children sitting in the marketplace, about whom their companions complain: ‘We played the flute for you but you would not dance. We sang a funeral song but you would not cry!’Already in Jesus’ generation people didn’t do things right. Nothing much has changed today. We too haven’t learned how to do things right. Consider these few examples. When certain family members are alive, we wish they were not always around. When they are dead, we cry our hearts out and wish they’d come back to life. When we have no work we move heaven and earth to find one for us. When we are employed, we’d drag our feet to the workplace on a blue Monday and wish it were a holiday.
When it is time to celebrate people go on a diet. But when it is time to fast as in the time of the Holy Week, people go to Bantayan Island in Cebu where eating pork is allowed. The locals in this island are fishermen. To encourage them to join the Lenten Church celebrations instead of going fishing, Vatican had given them permission to eat pork. This was many years ago. Livelihood in the island has changed, but the people still invoke the old indult to eat pork.
There is really no time to live two polarized lives. Some think that by weaving the good life and the bad life into one, they can have their cake and eat it too. This is one kind of tepidity that God abhors. In Revelations 3:15 we read: “Because you are neither hot nor cold, I will vomit you”. Either we are for God or we are for the devil. Either we do evil or we do things right. The time to make up our mind is now! – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM, Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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