The tension we experience between our desire to grow up and our perennial procrastination and infinite stalling in doing that reflects a tension that lies at the heart of Jesus’ message today, a tension between God’s promises as being already here and God’s promises as still coming. Everything Jesus promised is already here, and everything Jesus promised is still coming. We’re already living the new, resurrected life, even as we’re still waiting for it. Biblical scholars and theologians tell us that everything Jesus came to bring us – the Reign of God, the Kingdom of God, the New Age, the Final Age, the reign of justice on this earth, new life, the resurrection, eternal life, heaven – is already here, except that it’s also still coming. It’s here now, but not fully; a present reality, but in tension. And it’s still coming, in its fullness; still to arrive, in ecstasy. It’s already here, and it’s still yet to be realized. The followers of Jesus prefer to push everything off into the future, and the story comes to no good end. The reign of God announced by Jesus is not accepted. The ‘today’ offered by God is denied. And that, that alone, is why ‘already’ becomes ‘not yet.’ It is not only in Nazareth that the ‘today’ of the Gospel was not accepted. In the church’s history, we see that it has again and again been denied or rendered toothless. The reason was the same as in Nazareth: apparently, it goes against the human grain for God to become concrete in our lives. Then, people’s desires and favorite notions are in danger, as are their ideas about time. It can’t be today because that would mean our lives must change. Therefore, it can lie, hygienically and snugly packed, at rest, inconsequential. We’re like the guests in the Gospel parable invited to the wedding banquet. We, too, want to go to the feast and intend to go to the feast, but first, we need to attend to our marriages, our businesses, and our ambitions. We can get serious later. There’s time. We fully intend to take Jesus seriously; we just want a little more time before we do that. After converting to Christianity at age twenty-five, St. Augustine struggled for another nine years to bring his sexuality into harmony with his faith. During those nine years, he prayed this way: Lord, make me a chaste Christian, but not yet! To his credit, unlike many of us, he eventually stopped pushing things into the indefinite future.