And we think we have it bad...

“In that pregnant, packed bit of writing, whose numerous points we continually miss because we are so familiar with the sound of the words, the prologue to St. John’s gospel, the sentence occurs, ‘He came to his home, and his own family did not welcome him’. That is Goodspeed’s translation, and I think it gives you the stab of the sentence better than most others. Only it is perhaps a little daring, when the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity becomes incarnate on earth, to describe him as coming home. But it gets the point, the point which stands out so clearly if you try to read through the Old Testament. ...you can see, all down the centuries, an intensive work of preparation going on, for one particular event. The thunders of Sinai are the artillery meant to soften just this one particular point in Satan’s defences. The corpses piled up in such profusion are so much manure meant to fertilize this one particular plot of the earth’s surface. The sudden snatches of hundred per cent spirituality which keep on cropping up here and there in the Old Testament, taking your breath away, are the soft twigs and leaves out of which a nest is being built for the Heavenly Dove to find a refuge at last, after all the desolation the deluge has left behind it. ...everything’s ready for zero hour, the land was never in such good heart, the nest is all finished, down to the last detail: now!

And then, humanly speaking, the terrible fiasco which followed! ...let’s remind ourselves that this was, in effect, the experience of Incarnate God. His own people, his Bride, as the prophets loved to think of it, had no use for him, could make no room for him in its twisted habit of thought. ‘I was sought by those who found me not’—the prophets had always been foretelling it. The people our Lord came to redeem in the first instance, not all of them, but as a people, rejected him, and reject him still.

...‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often I would have gathered your children, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you refused’

...It isn’t so, after all, with the lives of the saints; when you read the life of a saint, you expect to be told about all the people the holy man succeeded in converting; the people who at first opposed him, but were afterwards won over by his gentleness and patience. But with our Lord’s life it is just the other way; we are continually being confronted with his failures. ‘After this, many of his disciples went back to their old ways, and walked no more in his company’—what a dreadful admission! In his own town of Nazareth he is unhonoured; he ‘cannot’ (whatever that means) do many miracles there, because of their unbelief; and these were the people who should have been so proud of him! Not even his kinsmen believed in him—just the people who ought to have known him best! And then there are the nine lepers who never come back to give thanks, and the three would-be disciples who turn out, after all, to be wouldn’t be disciples. And even in the training of his own apostles what a lot of setbacks there are; the want of faith, the want of patience, the want of humility, and then St. Peter’s denial as a kind of signature-tune at the end of it all! How our Lord’s own teaching reflects the mood of a disappointed man; the crops that come to nothing, the people who bury their talents in napkins, or say they will work in the vineyard and then don’t, or accept invitations to the wedding and then send word at the last moment that they can’t be there; the fish that have to be thrown back into the sea as uneatable, the people who keep on saying ‘Master, master’ and then do nothing about it; was there ever a Teacher so haunted by the sense of failure?

And, of course, there was Judas Iscariot, always at his elbow. ...”

~Ronald Knox