Thursday, December 12, 2013

2nd Week of Advent, Friday, 13-12-13

Isaiah 48:17-19 / Matthew 11:16-19

There is this famous quote :“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

If we think that this sounds familiar but we are not too sure who said it, it was Socrates, the Greek philosopher who lived  from 469 BC–399 BC.

And if we are parents and adults, we would nod our heads in agreement. What Socrates said of the youth during his time, and we are talking about that long ago, sounds so true even for today's youth.

Yet we must also remember that our elders had said such things about us before, and now we in turn are repeating it to our youth.

Is it like some kind of vicious circle, or is it that the oppressed becomes the oppressor?

Whatever it may be, criticism can never lead to any kind of conversion, be it the one criticising or the one being criticized.

In the gospel, Jesus pointed out the criticism against Him and John the Baptist. Yet that was nothing new because the prophets in the past had been subjected to such criticism and eventual persecution.

But Jesus did not come to continue the culture of criticism. Rather He came to bring about a culture of conversion.

He came to fulfill what the prophet Isaiah said in the 1st reading: I, the Lord, teach you what is good for you, I lead you in the way that you must go.

So may we have the wisdom to show and lead our youth in the way they should go as we ourselves walk the way that the Lord wants us to go.