Friday of the Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time

The Lord criticizes the crowds because they know how to read the signs in the weather, but they do not understand the moment in which they are standing. God himself, the Messiah they claim to have longed for, is now in their midst, and they do not recognize him. Their minds are consumed by natural things that matter to them. Whether it will rain or be hot determines how their day will go, how their crops will fare, and how their animals will be. These are the things that occupy their attention.

And we fall into that same trap. The old ways of predicting the weather may be falling away. Most of us cannot look at the clouds as our parents or grandparents could and know what the weather will be like. We pull up an app on our phone, and it does the work for us. But we still try to make predictions. We watch the markets. We try to predict politics, to see which way the winds are blowing. And more and more, people try to predict the outcome of sports games and bet on them. This looking for signs has never gone away. We have simply changed the way we do it.

But the motivation remains the same. We deeply desire particular outcomes. We want money. We want power. And so we spend our time and energy trying to understand these things, trying to predict. People wake up every day and check the news and the feeds. They want to stay on top of everything so that they can recognize the signs and get whatever it is they want.

In doing that, we reveal our hearts. We want the money. We want the influence. We want the power. We want those things more than anything else, and so we give them our time.

That is the heart of Jesus’ criticism. The crowds should have wanted God above all these things. They should have wanted that relationship with him. And if they had truly wanted it, they would have given their time and energy to recognizing the spiritual signs, to deepening their understanding of who God is. Then, the moment he appeared in their lives, they would have recognized him. They didn’t.

And the same is true for us. If we truly desire God with all our heart, if we truly want to know Jesus Christ, then that is where we will put our time and energy. Where we spend our time reveals what is really going on in our hearts.

Of course, there are things in this world we have to do. Just because you clean your house rather than pray does not mean you have made cleaning into an idol. You have to do those things. But we all have free time. We know what we do when we have a free moment, what we reach for. And that tells us what is really within our hearts.

We have to cultivate that desire for God. One of the challenges of the Christian life is making the heart and mind align. We say we love God. We know the faith. But if we do not desire God from the heart, we will not truly seek him. We will not deepen our understanding or prepare ourselves to recognize the signs of his presence.

Because God continues to step into our lives. He may not walk among us in a human body as he did two thousand years ago, but he is here. He is always present among us. And if we do not desire him and use our minds and hearts, our time and energy, to seek him, then we will not recognize those moments. Just like these crowds, we will miss him. We will miss the opportunity to truly come to know him, to experience the depths of his love for us.

So we need to look at ourselves and ask: Where is our heart truly? What is it we truly desire? We need to push away all those things that are not God himself and seek him with our whole heart, our whole mind, and all of our strength.