[Jesus spoke to the crowd saying:] “To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance;
we wailed, and you did not mourn.’
“For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” (Matthew 11:16-19)
T.S. Eliot once wrote, "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper." I wonder if his criticism of our time would be that we would meet the end of the world with a shrug either way.
Ours is a time of profound indifference and often willful ignorance--when terrible things happen around the world on any given day, and often our go-to response is to change the channel, turn away, deny it is actually happening, or otherwise bury our heads in the sand. Wars rage, while we simply complain about the impact on gas prices rather than those killed and injured. Neighborhoods in our cities and communities struggle with poverty and access to good food, and we obsess over when the next chain restaurant or coffee franchise will come to our area. Masked white supremacists march on the nation's capital during the 250th anniversary of our founding (with white face masks as contemporary versions of the old white hoods of an earlier time), and we can so easily dismiss it as merely "just another day's news." For all the ways that 24/7 news channels and the relentless barrage of social media posts keep us agitated and anxious, we are also increasingly desensitized to all of it and encouraged to tell ourselves, "This is fine" (like the famous cartoon of the dog sitting in a room that is on fire). And when someone speaks up to get our attention to see what is going wrong around us, it is very easy for us to dismiss them with a shrug as "just being dramatic" or "overreacting." We can always change the channel to something else, right? As the famous title of Neil Postman put it back in the 1980s, we are endlessly "amusing ourselves to death."
Jesus seems to have been prepared for addressing people in such an apathetic mindset. Here in these words from Matthew 11, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, Jesus laments that so many people in his day ignored both the jarring prophetic speech of John the Baptizer and the gentler dinner-party approach of Jesus himself. Both John and Jesus brought the same core message, the Gospels note: "The Reign of God has come near!" Both declared God's inbreaking kingdom and called people to turn their lives to be a part of it--John with his stark wilderness declarations, and Jesus with his personal invitations to the outcasts and sinners. But by and large, the crowds and the Respectable Religious Leaders rejected John and Jesus alike. The announcement of God's kingdom was like the end of an old order, an old world, and the beginning of something brand new, and yet, no matter how Jesus or John announced it, their listeners shrugged with indifference. That seems to be Jesus' concern here: how can we just look the other way and continue on with business as usual if this news is true? How can we remain unchanged and unmoved in the wake of their message?
Jesus' words, both to his own time and to ours, are meant to wake us up and jar us out of our indifference. The people of Jesus' day shrugged off both the fiery speeches of John and the winsome welcome of Jesus with the same apathetic, "So what?" response, and perhaps we are just as numb in our own time. We have learned to tune out the suffering of others and the facts that don't fit our preferred perspectives. We have taught ourselves we can ignore Jesus any time his words would challenge us or interrupt our routines, even if he is also bringing us the Good News of God's Reign. We have made ourselves unresponsive to the voices God keeps raising up to get us to pay attention, to see when things are not "just fine," and also to respond when we are summoned to participate in God's new thing.
The challenge for us today is to let Jesus unsettle us. Instead of shrugging off the people God sends to wake us up, we can listen. Instead of muttering "This is fine" to ourselves when the house is on fire, we can get up and start putting out the flames. Instead of finding ever newer ways of distracting ourselves, we can look where Jesus directs our attention. It can be difficult--and scary--but the alternative is a zombie sort of life in which we are unmoved or unaware of what is going on around us. Today is a day to let Jesus get our attention, and see what he would have us see.
As God's Reign breaks in among us even now, day by day, it is like an old world coming to an end and a whole new creation beginning. That is worth more than a shrug.
Lord Jesus, help us to see what you would have us see, and to respond along with you.
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