STILL DISAPPOINTED UNTIL NOW

Friday of the Second Week of Advent
Mt 11:16-19

Our worst enemy is our selves. Our great disappointments are the ones we our selves create. We want people to cater to our expectations. And when they fall short of our expectations, we are overly disappointed.

Unfortunately, there are times when we do the same with God. We try to fit Him into our categories. But because we cannot put God in a box, He will never fit our categories. And because our categories cannot contain Him, our expectations are not met. Then we are disappointed even with God. But take a deeper look at our situation. We are actually disappointed at our selves.

We are disappointed at our selves because we try to be God’s god when, in fact, we cannot be. We tell God what He should do, how He should do it, and when He should do it. But if God could be determined by our categories and influenced by our will, He then is not God; He is our puppet, our slave, our servant, our creation.

Jesus found His people difficult to please because He did not fit their categories of what the Messiah should be. But Jesus did not come to please anyone except the Father. Thus, “He came to His own but His own did not welcome Him” (Jn 1:11).

In one of my pilgrimages to the Holy Land, our local tour guide – a Jew herself – said that she and her people continue to wait for the Messiah. That was in 1997! She narrated how many times they thought this man or that man was already the Messiah, only to be disappointed with realizing that they were mistaken.

In the Gospel today, who really was disappointed: Jesus or the Jews? Whoever was, surely that disappointment lasts until now.