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14th Sunday B

The expression familiarity breeds contempt is as old as the hills. We find it in works ranging from Aesop’s fable of ‘The fox and the lion’, to the tale of Melibee in the Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer says, over-greet hoomlynesse (or familiarity) engendreth dispreisynge (engenders contempt). We all know from experience what the reality of this expression can mean in our lives. We get used to people and assume we know them. We take them for granted and can be blind to their good qualities. We become dismissive and are quick to find fault. We lose a sense of wonder.

In today’s gospel we hear of Jesus’ return to his home village after a period of preaching and working miracles around Galilee. No doubt news of his activities found its way back to Nazareth and on the Sabbath he is invited to teach in the local synagogue. Initially the people are astonished and they recognize in Jesus something out of the ordinary. Where did this man get all this, they ask, his wisdom and his power to work mighty deeds? We don’t know what Jesus said but the initial astonishment quickly sours and gives way to hostility and rejection. Who does he think he is? We know him. He grew up among us. He is just the local carpenter. We know his family. He is no different from us. How mistaken they are! Yes, familiarity breeds not just contempt but unbelief. Jesus says as much when he tells them, ‘a prophet is not without honour except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.’ And he is taken aback at their lack of faith.

Today’s gospel suggest that a great obstacle to faith is familiarity, hoomlynesse: a refusal to believe that God’s presence could possibly come to us in so familiar a form as the person next door; a resistance to recognise that God might have sent us a prophet in someone who, to our eyes, does not quite fit the bill. We can be like the locals of Nazareth who had fixed ideas as to when and where and how the Messiah should come to Israel. The local carpenter, the son of Mary, did not measure up. And they really missed out.

In today’s second reading St Paul draws our attention to another type of prophet that God sends into our midst, one to which we also turn a blind eye and even ask him to take away. Paul calls it ‘a thorn in the flesh’. All sorts of suggestions have been made as to the nature of this thorn in the flesh of the Apostle but that is not the point. For Paul it was the discovery that this thorn, the abiding personal weakness that he shunned, could be a channel of God’s grace, an opening onto the mystery of the cross of Christ. ‘I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me.’ Shutting the door will not do, he tells us, for the God who came to us in the flesh meets us there in the flesh of our experience, all of it, all of our self and our world.

Growth in the Spirit almost always shows itself in the capacity to recognise Christ more and more in the ordinary, the everyday. The great saints never ceased being filled with wonder at the mysterious presence of God. ‘The Word became flesh’ not only means that the Son of God became a human being, but that he took human form in a town as ordinary and insignificant and out of the way as Nazareth. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? For sure, it can! But can we identify the Nazareth in our own selves, in our families, in our community and open the door to the Heaven in ordinarie that is in the place we would least expect it to be?

Fr Senan OSB

12^th Sunday in Ordinary Time B

Glenstal, 20.06.2021, 10 a.m.

Job 38:1-4, 8-11 2 Corinthians 5:14-17 Mark 4:35-41

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? (Job 38:1) Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb? (Job 38:4)

On hearing these words Job must have thought that God was entirely alone when he made the world, and that, being all-wise and all-powerful, our Creator had no need of an agent to carry out his work. But in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel we read: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. All things came into being by him, and nothing has come into being except through him (Jn 1:1-3). These verses tell us in the clearest terms that in fact God is not a lonely being, and he always acts through the agency of his eternal companion – the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us (cf. Jn 1:1-3) in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

None of the so-called synoptic gospels – those of Matthew, Mark and Luke – refer to Jesus Christ as the divine Word incarnate, but they too make many allusions to Jesus’ divine nature. For instance, they present Jesus as a man who performs some of the actions that Holy Scripture attributes to God alone, as is the case in today’s third reading, taken from the Gospel of Mark. So let us take a quick look at the main points of the story.

The boat in which Jesus and his disciples were sailing across the Sea of Galilee was being tossed about by a mighty storm. Woken up by his terrified disciples, Jesus ordered the wind to cease, and the sea to be still, and at once they obeyed his command. Seeing this, the disciples could not but have remembered the words of psalm 107: they cried to the Lord in their need and he rescued them from their distress. He stilled the storm to a whisper: all the waves of the sea were hushed (Ps 107, 29). This was how God had rescued those who were about to be swallowed up by the waves, so the disciples asked themselves: “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mk 4:41)

Who indeed is this man who became known to history as Jesus of Nazareth? Countless answers to this question have been given down the centuries, but for those whose minds have been enlightened by faith there is only one answer that can be deemed true and accurate: Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God (cf. Mt 16:16). As St Paul says, we no longer know him from a human point of view (cf. 2 Co 5:16) but profess rather that Jesus Christ is the only son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God (Nicene Creed). And because faith tell us that Jesus is both human and divine, we place all our hope in his promise that he will always be with us, even to the end of time (cf. Mt 28:20).

In fact trusting that Jesus is very close to us all the time, wherever we may be, we can also understand that today’s gospel is a true parable of our own life in this world – and not just an account of an astonishing miracle that happened in the past – for, when we received the gift of faith and were washed clean in the waters of baptism, we accepted our Lord’s invitation to step into a boat and sail across with him to the other side (cf. Mk 4:35). We are now on our way to our homeland in heaven (cf. Ph 3:20) and are sure to reach our destination if we no longer live for ourselves but for him who died and was raised for our sake (cf. 2 Co 5:16). There can be no doubt that our voyage is a perilous one. At times it may seem that Jesus never really woke up from the sleep of death, and we are going to be engulfed by the waters of destruction. But all shall be well if we have faith (cf. Mk 4:40) and bear in mind the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: “In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (Jo 16:33).

Fr Lino OSB