Sorrow and joy in counterpoint

A recording of today’s gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 11:16-19) evokes the song of the Lord that we heard sung in the liturgy of the feast of the Immaculate Conception on Monday. Jesus addressed the crowd with what seemed an obscure parallel. This generation, He said:

is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”

He goes on to bewail the contradictory criticisms levelled first at John the Baptist and then Himself, and concludes quite enigmatically:

Yet wisdom is justified by her deeds.

What are we to make of such a collision of conundrums, collecting so decidedly in the space of a few verses? What does the Lord mean?

It all depends on what He refers to as this generation. It would be easy – and it is indeed common – to assume that He means His listeners, the people who would go on to criticise both John the Baptist and Himself. But what if He does not? What if, instead, this generation means precisely John the Baptist and Himself, the generation born in the reign of King Herod, the generation whose births were announced by angelic visitors, and who speak now in the reign of Herod’s son?  

For John the Baptist sang a dirge of repentance to the Israelites of his time. John offered the Chosen People the possibility of pronouncing, as it were, a fiat in sorrow, a recognition that they had sinned, and that they needed God’s forgiveness, an admission that there was much that they had to let go of in order to have open hands to welcome the coming Kingdom of God. Of course, some heard and embraced John’s message; but so many more did not, including the leaders of the Jewish people, and notably Herod Antipas himself who, though attracted to the tone of John’s music, could not agree to the sorrow it sought to induce in his heart.

But John’s music was only a preparation for Jesus’ melody which found its key, as we reflected a few days ago, in the original harmony of His mother with the Eternal Father and the grace notes of the Holy Spirit. Jesus echoed John’s theme of fiat in sorrow, but He added another richer strain of a fiat in joy, telling His followers from the Sermon on the Mount to rejoice in suffering and persecution. While John came in sackcloth and ashes, Jesus proceeded in festivity after His extraordinary fast in the desert at the beginning of His ministry, returning to John’s sorrowful dirge only from time to time, and most especially in His Passion.  

Like all the greatest truths of our faith, then, the flute of Jesus and the dirge of John hold together in a paradox, bringing to light the false joys of those who resist John’s lament and the dourness of those who neglect Jesus’ joy. The harmonious blending of the two is the fruit of wisdom who is justified in her deeds, says Jesus.

What deeds, we ask? The deeds of salvation which require, first, conversion in a repentant mode, and then, a living out of our adoption as children of God, in which we are exposed to the great festivity of a Father - who rejoices at the return of His wayward little ones - and commanded to share in it.

How can we join that new song of the Lord, initiated in the Immaculate Conception, continued in the harmony of Mary and the Father, and that takes flight in the glorious melody of the Son of God? We join it now by listening deeply to the sorrowful dirge of John and the joyous flute of Jesus, and then little by little, by raising our voices, to turn their duet of wisdom into a mighty choral outburst of eternal love.