Jesus Must Be In His Father’s House

From today’s reading…

Why do we make things more complicated than they need to be?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky understood this quirk in man and wrote about it in 1864 in Notes From the Underground:

“And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself–as though that were so necessary– that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”

Now, in Mary and Joseph’s defense, Jesus was only 12 years old, and they did not fully grasp His calling, nor how He would fulfill it.

They were not ungrateful, nor were they filled with spite.

They were just concerned, worried, frantic parents looking for their lost, only child.

However, you and I are a different story.

We are ungrateful.

We do look gift horses in the mouth.

We do cut off our noses to spite our faces.

We are not thankful and appreciative for the life God has given us.

We do play nasty tricks on our loved ones, our friends, our enemies, and ourselves.

We do throw good money after bad.

We do risk the good just to flirt with the unseemly, the nasty, the rubbish.

We are fatalistic.

We allow our tempers to get the best of us and snap all the clubs in our bag to prove to no one we can par the back nine with only our 7-iron. (Any “Tin Cup” fans out there? Don Johnson puts Kevin Costner in his place.)

Learn from Mary and Joseph.

Always be looking for Jesus, but learn from Jesus that the best place to begin your search is in His Father’s house because finding Him is the only way to…

Stay the course.Keep the faith.Endure.

Now go sell something.

Kevin Costner cuts off his nose to spite his face.

Don Johnson puts Kevin Costner in his place: