Every village square has the same scene. One group of children starts a game, and another group sits on the edge and will not join. Nobody is shouting, nobody is being cruel; they simply refuse to play, and the refusal is enough to stop everything.
Then the Lord said: "Therefore, to what shall I compare the men of this generation? And to what are they similar? They are like children sitting in the marketplace, speaking to one another, and saying: 'We sang to you with flutes, and you did not dance. We lamented, and you did not weep.' For John the Baptist came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' The Son of man came, eating and drinking, and you say, 'Behold, a voracious man and a drinker of wine, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' But wisdom is justified by all her children." (Lk 7:31-35)
Jesus reaches for the smallest thing within sight. Not a throne, not an army, not the great arguments of the theologians who are listening to him. Children in a market square, and a game that never begins. It is one of those comparisons that seem almost too light for the subject, until we notice how exactly it fits.
The children are playing at the two things that structure every human life. First the wedding: someone takes up a flute, and the others are supposed to dance. Then the funeral: someone begins the lament, and the others are supposed to beat their breasts and cry. Joy and grief, the whole register of what it means to be alive, rehearsed in miniature. And the complaint in the children's mouths is not that the music was badly played. It is that nothing happened at all. Whoever refuses to join holds a quiet power over everybody else, because the game cannot start without them.
Then Jesus names what he means, and the naming is devastating in its simplicity. John the Baptist came from the desert, eating no bread, drinking no wine, austere to the point of strangeness, and the verdict was: he has a demon. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, sitting at tables, going to weddings, accepting invitations from the wrong people, and the verdict was: a glutton and a drinker. Two lives as different as two lives can be. Two condemnations.
That is the hinge of the whole passage. The two verdicts contradict each other. If austerity is proof of madness, then good humour cannot also be proof of corruption. Held side by side, the accusations cancel out, and in cancelling out they betray themselves. They were never really about John, and never really about Jesus. They were about people who had already decided not to move, and who found their reasons afterwards.
This is uncomfortable because it is so familiar. The difficulty here is not ignorance; nobody in the square lacks information. It is that criticism can serve as a shelter. As long as something is wrong with the messenger, we are excused from the message. The priest speaks too long, the neighbour is a hypocrite, the community is not what it used to be, and each observation may even be true, and all of them together keep us comfortably seated while the music plays.
Notice what Jesus does with the last insult. He does not deny it. A friend of tax collectors and sinners: it is accurate, and he lets it stand. It will become one of the truest things ever said about him, an accusation that turned into a title. He does not defend his reputation and he does not adjust his behaviour to satisfy his critics. He simply keeps sitting at the table with the people he came for.
And then the closing line, which sounds almost mild after the sharpness of what precedes it: wisdom is justified by all her children. Not by argument. Wisdom does not win the debate in the marketplace, and Jesus makes no attempt to win it. She is vindicated by the people she produces, by lives that could not be explained any other way. That is a relief and a demand at the same time. None of us is asked to out-argue our age; we are asked to let the wisdom of God become visible somewhere, in one ordinary life.
Paul writes today to a community that was doing exactly what the children in the square were doing, ranking one another, measuring gifts, deciding who counted. He answers by showing them a still more excellent way, and it is worth noticing how much of his description of love is made of things love does not do. It is not envious, it does not act wrongly, it is not puffed up, it is not provoked to anger, it thinks no evil, it does not rejoice over iniquity but rejoices in the truth. Much of charity turns out to be the quiet dismantling of the reflex to judge.
Then Paul adds the sentence that removes us from the judge's chair altogether: now we see through a mirror, in obscurity. Our sight is partial. Our verdicts, therefore, are provisional, and the person we have already summed up is larger than our summary. Love believes all things and hopes all things, which is simply another way of saying that love keeps the file open.
Here the crib at Bethlehem says the same thing in a different key. God comes as a child, which means God comes refusable. A baby offers no leverage, wins no argument, forces nobody's hand. The shepherds did not first evaluate the credentials of what they were told; they went, and they found the sign was as poor as they had been warned. The smallness of God leaves us entirely free, and that freedom is precisely why it is possible to sit on the edge of the square and let the whole thing pass by.
Today the Church remembers Cornelius and Cyprian, a pope and a bishop who disagreed with each other, seriously and in writing, about how to receive back those who had failed under persecution. They argued, and they remained brothers, and both of them gave their lives. That is a small commentary on this Gospel: they did not refuse to play.
So this Wednesday is modest and quite precise. One person comes to mind, the one we have already filed under a verdict, the confrere or neighbour or family member whose behaviour we can predict and whose case, in our minds, is closed. Do one thing today that only makes sense if the file is open again. Greet them first. Accept the invitation. Ask a genuine question and stay for the answer.
Wisdom is justified by all her children, and we are allowed to be among them. Not by winning the argument, but by dancing when the flute plays and weeping when the lament is sung, available to whatever God is doing today, even when he does it in a form we would never have chosen.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Father, you have sent us your word in more than one voice, and we have often listened only to find fault. Forgive us the safety of our judgements, and the comfort of standing at the edge of what you are doing. Give us the freedom of your love, which is patient, which is kind, which does not keep a record of wrongs and does not close the file on anyone. Teach us to recognise you in the forms we did not choose, and to answer the music you play, whether it calls us to dance or to weep. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Which messenger have we dismissed lately, and what did the dismissal spare us from doing?
- Where are we still sitting at the edge of the square, waiting for a better invitation?
- What would change in us this week if we let love believe all things about one difficult person?
