Luke 7: A glutton and a drunkard

I love it when we can catch a glimpse of Jesus' sense of humor, like when he calls out people who never fail to find something to complain about: "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 at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!'" (7:33-34).

Nearly 1,900 years later, the great English writer G.K. Chesterton was drawn to Christianity in part by his observation of a similar phenomenon. In his masterpiece "Orthodoxy," he wrote that, as a young agnostic, he noticed that Christianity was "attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons" -- for being both too optimistic and too pessimistic, too warlike and too pacifistic, too austere and too pompous.

"It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with," he wrote. "What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?"

Chesterton summarized his eventual conclusion in an essay on "The Macbeths": "If you hear a thing being accused of being too tall and too short, too red and too green, too bad in one way and too bad also in the opposite way, then you may be sure that it is very good."

People will always find things to blame Christianity for. But the church is large -- it has room for fasts and feasts, silent monks and ebullient charismatics, saints and sinners, thank God.

(Image: Strickland, "G.K.C.," 1912)