14th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B - Prophets and “For You Are My God”
To listen to Sunday 7pm Choir’s latest song & video, “For You Are My God”, scroll down and click on the video thumbnail.
Friends, the theme that links the readings this weekend seems to be that of the “rejected prophet”. The not very attractive (but mercifully brief) First Reading, taken from the call of the prophet Ezekiel, sets this up. The Lord instructs the prophet that he is to stand by his message even though it will be met with rejection from a rebellious people. The message will be vindicated in due course.
It is against this background that the Gospel describes Jesus’ return to his hometown Nazareth. He is accompanied by his disciples, who are now beginning to constitute his “new family”, distinct from the members of his original family listed here. When on the Sabbath day Jesus begins to teach in the synagogue, his former townsfolk are amazed at the authority and wisdom of his words.
RIGHT QUESTION, WRONG TONE
In a sense, they ask the right question, “Where did the man get all this?” but the contemptuous tone (“the man”) already signals rejection. Had they pondered a little longer on the “where”, they might have begun to arrive at the right solution: that the authority and wisdom Jesus is displaying comes from his empowerment with the Spirit of God.
Instead, the Nazarenes immediately seek to put him back into the box of their previous knowledge of him: he is the carpenter and, yes, they know and can list all the members of his family. With this they can be comfortable. Impossible that one of them, one so familiar, could really be a prophet sent from God to instruct them. Small-town prejudice and narrow-mindedness blinker perception of the reality that is there before them, forcing Jesus to repeat in reference to Nazareth the adage, “The only place where prophets are without honour is in their own hometown, . . .”.
FAITH ALLOWS GOD'S POWER
What is remarkable here is the way in which the Gospel so frankly records Jesus’ helplessness to do any such deeds of power for his townsfolk because of their lack of faith. Faith or the lack of it conditioned his power to help. Put another way (and more positively); it is faith that allows God’s power to be effective in our world.
The episode shows that the greatest enemy to faith can simply be “familiarity”: a refusal to believe that God’s presence and God’s power could come to us in so familiar a form as the person next door. The Nazarenes had their own fixed ideas as to when and where and how the Messiah should come to Israel – and the one they knew as the local carpenter simply didn’t fit the bill. So the only place that really missed out on Jesus’ works of power was his own hometown.
Progress in the spiritual life almost always shows itself in the ability to recognize God in the ordinary, the everyday. This is why the great saints never stopped wondering – being filled with wonder at the mysterious presence of God they constantly sensed all round them. The full meaning of the Incarnation is not only 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. Perhaps we have to identify and name “the Nazareth” in our own lives and with faith acclaim: “Lord, you and you alone are my God!’
In honour of this weekend’s readings, we present our latest video, "For You Are My God”, a beautiful song composed by John Foley and sung in churches throughout the world.
Video can be watched by clicking here or on the picture below:
