To what then will I compare the people of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.”
For John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Nevertheless, wisdom is vindicated by all her children.
Luke 7:31-35
The film The Critic (2023) stars the great Ian McKellen as an influential theater critic who’s known for his very sharp and devastating reviews and Gemma Arterton as an actress whom he’s criticized mercilessly for years. One day, they meet unexpectedly on the street, and she lets him have a piece of her mind.
“You’ve compared me to livestock, creatures of the sea, and an extinct bird,” she tells him. “You’ve said my voice is fluting, grating, girlish, and manly. You’ve described me as plump and emaciated. Which is it?” She then quotes one of his reviews to him: “‘Her Mrs. Halstead is glamorous but ungainly. She doesn’t seem to know how to walk.’ How to walk? You’ve been dishing out at me for a decade and now it’s going to stop.”
And to that, the old critic replies: “Oh, are you retiring?”
As zingers go it’s pretty good, but I think we can all sympathize with the frustration of the poor actress who’s been on the receiving end of these for years. She’s fed up with it. She’s telling him: “You’ve called me too fat and you’ve called me too skinny. You’ve called me too manly and too girlish. Which one is it? It’s like you don’t even care about how I did on stage; all you care about is finding fault with something.”
Something like this is what’s going on in this passage from Luke’s Gospel. It’s like Jesus is saying, “Look, when John the Baptist came fasting and teetotaling and preaching repentance and judgment, you said, ‘Oh, watch out for him, he’s a religious zealot, he’s probably possessed, what he’s saying is crazy.’ Then I came eating and drinking and preaching forgiveness and God’s love for sinners, and you said, ‘Oh, watch out for him, he’s a glutton and a drunk and he makes friends with terrible people.’ So which is it? Is God’s word too strict or too gracious? Too judgmental or not judgmental enough? C’mon, guys — it’s like you’re just looking for some way to find fault. You’re just sitting around in the marketplace criticizing. But it’s easy to be a critic. You’re trying to look wise but you’re not actually searching for wisdom.”
We behave like that sometimes, don’t we? All of us do. Why? There are lots of possible reasons, but often what’s going on is that we’re using criticism as a defense mechanism. Criticism is the armor that we put on to defend ourselves against the criticism of everyone else. You see, if I can cut you down first then you can’t cut me down. Criticism becomes our way of feeling safe. Often there are insecure children somewhere deep down inside of critics, who felt like they never measured up and were never loved unless they did everything right, which they never did.
Like the actress in The Critic, Jesus is calling us out on this. He’s showing us what we’re doing. It’s uncomfortable to hear but we may well need to hear it — because we might have been doing this for so long that we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We might have a very hard time turning it off, stopping the criticism and appreciating what’s in front of us, searching for real wisdom, open for once to receiving somebody else’s criticism and letting it change us.
Now, if Jesus was just another critic, he probably wouldn’t reach us when we’ve become like this. He wouldn’t reach us because we’ve become too good at defending ourselves against criticism. It wouldn’t be hard for us to find some kind of fault with what Jesus says. We can come up with some kind of intellectual argument. We can point to the church Jesus started, with all of its flaws. We can find something. Of course that’s what Jesus is pointing out — we can always find something if we want to find something. But are we really listening to what he has to tell us?
I think the only thing that conquers our defenses is God’s unconditional love and grace. We have our defensive armor up because we don’t know that kind of love and mercy in our lives. Somewhere in our past we learned not to trust in love, not to believe in forgiveness, and so we’re always on our toes with our fists up, ready to fight off the next blow. But we’re exhausted.
The theologian Karl Barth once said that we would understand the beautiful words of 1 Corinthians 13 better if we replaced every instance of the word love with the name of Jesus. Like so: Jesus is patient; Jesus is kind; Jesus is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jesus is not irritable or resentful; he does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. The love of Jesus never ends.
Our God invites each of us to open our hearts to the love of Jesus today. God invites you to hear his words of forgiveness spoken over you and really believe it, as God’s absolute truth in your life. When you do, you’ll find that you don’t need to find fault with Jesus or anyone else — you don’t need to defend yourself anymore. You can lay your weapons down.
The Rev. Jordan Hylden, ThD is Associate Rector for Christian Education at St. Martin's, Houston. Previously, he served churches in Louisiana, South Carolina, and Dallas, and as Canon Theologian for the diocese of Dallas. He has served as a General Convention deputy and on TEC's Task Force for Communion Across Difference. His doctoral work focused on democracy and authority in Catholic social thought. He and his wife, the Rev. Emily Hylden, make their home in Houston with their three boys Charles, Donnie, and Jacob.