FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

The Gospels do not give us much on Jesus’ upbringing;  but  it is safe to assume that Mary and Joseph were Jews who trusted in God’s plan and brought Jesus up accordingly.

Well, nearly twenty years later, Jesus sets out from his home, and begins his formal ministry. He is seen traveling around the Galilee, teaching, and healing and calling others to a new sort of life.  Word spreads, as word tends to do, and people flock to Jesus. Jesus has been busy, and away from home, but the road now leads him back to Nazareth.

Nazareth was a place of some comfort for Jesus. It held sights and sounds that forced him to think of playing in the dusty alleys or sitting down to a Sabbath meal with his family. But whatever nostalgia flooded back was quickly stemmed by  a collective inability to see the hand of God at work because of past assumptions:  ‘Where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been granted him, and these miracles that are worked through him? This is the carpenter, surely, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joset and Jude and Simon? His sisters, too, are they not here with us?’ 

“ A prophet is only despised in his own country, among his own relations and in his own house.”

Prophets are not dictated by comfort or custom but driven by divine obligation. Hometowns are places often bound, sometimes paralysed, by precedent. Hometowns often toe the line of the status quo.  

Thinking about a hometown is an exercise in thinking about the complexity of being human, our myriad, everyday habits—some good, some not so good. It is about appreciating the intricate beauties of a place we have called home for years. But it is also about shrewd ways we insulate our lives from failure, from fear, from “those people.” What are the hometowns we have created for ourselves? Where are the places of comfort that have brought us grace? Where are the sealed-off places where we are doing our best to insulate ourselves and curate a nice, clean life, untouched by those we deem filthy?

But letting God speak into what we think of as the warmest, places of our lives might increase our souls’ capacity for love—for both God and our neighbours. If we allow Jesus’ prophetic presence to sink in, something like scales might well fall from our eyes, encouraging us to see those who were, for the longest time, invisible. We might start to witness walls of hostility and division come down or cease to be built in the first place. We might learn to welcome those whom we, at one time, labelled “unsafe” or “other” or “criminal”.

 Besides all this, we see something in the story that is as troubling as it is interesting. Jesus is unrecognized in his hometown. He is recognized of course, but he is not accepted as one who is deeply connected with God. Indeed, once they do begin to recognize him, they are offended by him. And it is in this unbelief, that Jesus cannot work as powerfully as he would have normally. “He was amazed at their lack of faith.”

This should concern all of us who claim to know who and what Jesus is. The church is the hometown of Jesus, as it were. Are we offended by him?  The church has, at times, carefully kept Jesus safe and contained, but Jesus keeps leaving the familiar, and most importantly keeps showing up in strange places that are not his hometown.

Of course, we meet in this space each week. We come for solace and strength. We certainly believe that Jesus is present with us, especially in the Holy Eucharist; but Jesus is also found outside, in the villages, in the world. We disciples are always playing catch-up to the Risen Lord. Ever since that day when the women found an empty tomb, we have been going to where Jesus has gone ahead of us, into Galilee, into the villages, into our neighbourhoods. And once we go there, seeking him in the face our neighbours, he will be revealed, and we will be empowered to do his work: healing wounds, preaching God’s love, and calling out evil.

Let us go from here, into the villages following Jesus where he has already gone—and not simply following him but being empowered by him to do his work of love and healing which the world so desperately needs.