Too fool to respond

September 18, 2019
Wednesday, 24th Week in Ordinary Time
1st Reading: 1 Tim 3: 14-16
Gospel: Lk. 7:31-35
Jesus said, “What comparison can I use for these people? What are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace, about whom their companions complain: ‘We piped you a tune and you wouldn’t dance; we sang funeral songs and you wouldn’t cry.’ “Remember John: he didn’t eat bread or drink wine, and you said: ‘He has an evil spirit.’ Next came the Son of Man, eating and drinking, and you say: ‘Look, a glutton for food and wine, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But the children of Wisdom always recognize her work.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
A psychiatrist chances upon a patient at a mental ward holding a fishing rod while sitting at his bed. The patient looks sad, and so the psychiatrist tries to cheer him up. “If you will drop your fishing hook on the other side of your bed, you will have a better catch”, the psychiatrist suggests. The patient looks at him and says, “You fool, how can you fish on a concrete floor?” The psychiatrist learns his lesson: fools can drive us crazy.
Jesus likened his mission to dealing with fools. The Jews neither believed in John the Baptist who avoided food, nor in him who went about eating and drinking with tax collectors. In disgust Jesus exclaimed: “The children of Wisdom always recognize her work” (Lk. 7:35). It was his polite way of saying they were not children of wisdom because they did not recognize his works. In plain language, they were fools.
If they were children of Wisdom they would have recognized the dawning of salvation. But they did not. Not even the Pharisees who claimed to belong to the intelligent circle of society did. They rejected Jesus because they were dead sure of their conclusions that the Messiah could not come from their neighbourhood. Time hasn’t loosened them up. Up till now the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah to come. Theodore Roosevelt, in a speech in 1917 said, “Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time”.
Today the Lord visits us in manifold grace-filled opportunities we ignore. We can cite examples. We rant about the imperfections of society because we do not recognize them as a call to make a difference by changing ourselves.
We grumble that there are many poor people because we do not recognize that our failure to pay our workers well has contributed to society’s poverty problem. We condemn our politicians for being foolish in the way they govern because we fail to recognize ourselves as electors of fools. In all these we must be driving God crazy, and this too we fail to recognize! – (Atty.) Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., D.M.