The Messenger - December 2007 - Editorial Dec 07
By John Looby, SJ - 01 December 2007
Acceptance and Rejection.
I know my parents warned me against taking too literally the vague invitation ‘you must come and see us sometime’. But this invitation was for a certain day and a certain time. When they opened the door I recognized immediately that they had no recollection of ever inviting me, least of all, of inviting me that evening. All my efforts went into saving them from embarrassment and I was left to shoulder my own sense of rejection alone. No great harm was done, but looking back, I realized that I was chary of accepting invitations for years afterwards. I was not going to be embarrassed again.
Maybe it was sensitivity on this point, which left me astonished at the way Christ dealt with unmistakable rejection all his life. It wasn’t as if his coming was not signalled well in advance by the prophets. Finally, immediately before he appeared, John the Baptist announced that he was already among them. All the same when Christ was born ‘there was no room for him at the inn’. I wonder if that wasn’t another effort to save his people embarrassment. The whole point of travelling to Bethlehem was to be among his own people when the census was taken, and in the Near East, as in Ireland in the old days, you always stayed with relatives. Staying at an inn did not come into question. Yet he was not welcome. ‘He came unto his own, and his own received him not.’ His own people could tell the Three Wise Men when and where he was to be born, but the information was used by King Herod in an attempt to kill him. It was the three strangers who came to meet him. As Christ began his public ministry, he was driven out of his own hometown of Nazareth, and as he ended his life on earth, Jerusalem gave him a brief welcome on Palm Sunday but reverted to rejection in a few days to the roars of ‘crucify him!’
Remembering my own sensitivity to a single rejection, I wonder at Christ’s courage in continuing to come into his people’s lives with good news. You see how he favoured anyone who would listen: the publican friends of Matthew, the woman taken in adultery, the lepers, and the thief on the cross. In fact anyone who would listen. He instructed his disciples to bring down blessings on any house in which they were welcomed.
Especially there was the house of Martha and her sister Mary and her brother Lazarus. We know he loved them. Was it I wonder, because here he found someone who did listen carefully to what he had to say? Christ had to defend Mary from her sister’s efforts to distract her. Mary had chosen the better part. ‘To those who received him he gave power to be made the children of God.’ It is still the same: Acceptance and rejection.
John Looby, S.J.