Memorial of Saints Cornelius, Pope, and Cyprian, Bishop, Martyrs

I think we’ve all met people whom you can never please. No matter what you do, it’s never the right thing. They always have another complaint. But that is not what this Gospel is about, although there are similarities. Jesus is describing people who want their own decisions affirmed.

They play the flute, and you should dance. They sing a dirge, and you should weep. That is how the Pharisees and the Sadducees are behaving. It’s not that they can’t be pleased. It’s that the only way to please them is to do exactly what they want. They want control, and Jesus and John the Baptist are not giving them that control.

So they complain. But their complaints are nonsensical, because they don’t really care about the things they’re complaining about. What bothers them is that Jesus and John are not doing what they want. That’s the issue.

And the truth is that Christ is not here to please us. Neither was John the Baptist. They came to call us to conversion. That means telling us things we don’t want to hear and calling us to change things in ourselves that we would rather leave alone. They challenged people and called them to something better, and those people didn’t like it.

We all struggle with that at times. We want God to tell us what we want to hear. We don’t want him to challenge us or ask us to change. And sometimes that struggle goes so far that we confuse God with our own desires.

I encountered that once here with a group of couples in second or third marriages. What surprised me was the boldness with which they told me their story. The Church would not affirm their decisions. She would call them to repentance: to leave those relationships behind, or at least to live them in a way that was not contrary to God’s will.

But rather than change, they told me they had prayed about it and decided that God was calling them to start their own church. So they did. That church is still here today.

Rather than hear the challenge of the Gospel—the challenge to their own will and desires, the call to holiness—they recreated God in their own image. Now their Jesus would affirm their decisions. They would present him as saying whatever they wanted to hear.

Religion can very easily become that for any of us. I want something, and I want it badly. Therefore, God must be telling me it’s okay. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to tell everyone else that God says it’s okay.

That is playing the flute and demanding that God dance for us. But that is not what we’re called to. Christ speaks the truth to us, and sometimes that truth is difficult and challenging. We know we will sometimes fail as we try to follow him. Yet what he asks of us is best for us.

We may get away with these delusions in this life. But when we stand face to face with God at the judgment, none of them will carry any weight. Only the truth will remain. Reality will remain. We will see the real consequences of our decisions. So it is best for us to listen to God now: to let him speak the truth to our hearts and call us to conversion, however great that struggle may be.

The only person whose every decision God affirmed was Christ himself, because he is God and his will is perfectly united with him. The rest of us should expect to hear “no” sometimes. We should expect to be challenged as we move toward that perfection.

So whenever we think God is telling us “yes” to something we badly want, we need to stop and ask ourselves: Am I truly listening? Am I really listening to God in this moment, or am I choosing to hear myself and call it God?

We want to hear his voice. We want to hear the truth. Because that is what leads us to life. That is what leads us to where we really want to go.