In the gospel, Jesus says that people nowadays are like children. Either they are too worldly, too selfish or too stubborn. He says that his detractors would not accept John the Baptist’s call for repentance and self-denial. When Jesus proclaimed the Good News to them, they neither listened. They called John possessed, and branded Jesus as a glutton and a drunkard because he ate with tax collectors and sinners. Why were these people so unbelieving?
But that is precisely how our Christian way of life goes. God’s love for each and everyone of us is boundless, but He does not force us to follow Him and love Him in return. God gave us the freedom to follow His path or to go the other way. William Barclay considers this as love’s greatest tragedy – “to look at some loved one who has taken the wrong way and to see what might have been, what could have been and what was meant to have been. That is life life’s greatest heartbreak.”
At this point in my life, have I been using my freedom to follow the straight path, or have I been turning a deaf ear to God’s call which continues to come to me through my friends in my community?
