A steady stream of shoppers flowed in and out of the constantly swinging swinging-doors of the downtown department store. These shoppers came in the two Saturday-afternoon varieties, namely those who strode through resolutely for they knew what they wanted, and those who ambled through aimlessly for they hadn’t a clue what they wanted.
Amongst the bustling crowd there was one young boy who belonged firmly in the former category. He knew what he wanted and was prepared to voice his demands in no uncertain terms.
His young mother looked distraught, and little wonder.
This jumping up and down vociferous four-year old was only part of her problem. She also had with her an almost three year old girl who seemed intent upon making a break for freedom every time she lifted her eyes off her, and a one-year old whose sole source of amusement seemed to be to throw his toy car as far out of the buggy as possible, every time it was returned to him.
“Mammy, can I have another packet of crisps?” the oldest of the trio yelled up at her.
“No, Jim, you can’t!” came the equally forceful reply. “You have already had two packets of crisps and a Mars bar this afternoon.”
“Oh please, Mammy, go on!” Jim persisted.
“No! I told you, no!” mother retorted angrily. “Ask for nothing more, for you are getting nothing more!”
Then she proceeded to vent her frustration with and upon the entire family.
“You have my head turned the lot of you!” she exclaimed.
I smiled as I passed for I thought I knew how the frazzled mother felt.
Her head was turned.
What she said did not mean that her head had executed a painful ninety or one hundred and eighty degree rotation upon her shoulders. It meant that she was fast running out of patience. She had been both pestered and provoked until she had become both irritated and infuriated.
We all come to that point sometimes, don’t we?
Did you ever realize, however, that it is even possible for an all-loving, usually longsuffering, God, to become impatient with awkward people?
Examples of this abound in the Bible, beginning with the Old Testament history of the nation of Israel. God had promised Abraham that His descendants would become ‘a great nation’, but yet a few hundred years later He was threatening to wipe them off the face of the earth for they had climaxed a constant carping about their conditions by a flagrant flaunting of God’s law. They had begun worshipping an idol in the form of a hastily sculptured golden calf.
And when God sent His Son into the world to be the Saviour of the world, little had changed. The blatant disregard for Divine law was evident in the desecration of the holy place, the Temple. This angered our Lord so much that He made a whip of small cords and drove out all the dealers and hucksters, with their animals, calling after them as they beat a hasty retreat that they had turned his ‘Father’s house into a den of thieves.’
There is something else, though, which God must find equally as irritating as an open rebellion against His laws and that is an apathetic rejection of His Son.
This happened to Jesus, and it hurt.
His disciple and close friend John, summarized the situation very succinctly when he observed, ‘He was in the world, and though the world was made by him, the world did not receive him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.’ (John 1: 10-11)
Throughout his life Jesus had healed the sick, raised the dead, and brought a message of love and peace and hope, yet the nation’s leaders rejected Him, and others simply chose to ignore Him. The pathos of His outburst as He approached the holy city, just before His crucifixion, echoes a sense of frustration at spurned Divine advances, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!’ He cried, ‘How often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”
And the nation had its final say when Jesus stood trial before a Roman governor and His own Jewish nation fumed in a frenzy, ‘Away with him! Crucify him! We don’t want this man to reign over us!’
In the present day, however, in out multicultural multi-tolerant society, many of us consider ourselves too civilized to make an outright rebellion against or an outspoken rejection of the claims of Christ upon our lives. We simply ignore Him, hurrying past on the other side, and muttering something about ‘freedom of religion and expression’, as we go.
The picture is not totally black, however. For John concludes his synopsis of Jesus’ earthly life and mission with the words, ‘Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God…’ (John 1:12)
There was a minority who believed in Him, and found peace, joy and satisfaction in that belief.
People had a choice then, and they still have.
We can either accept Christ as God’s Son and our Saviour, or break God’s heart and ‘turn His head’, by either openly rejecting, or simply ignoring Him.
The choice is ours.