4th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Fr. Simham)

This Sunday we read from the Gospel of Luke, continuing immediately from last week’s Gospel. Recall that in last Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah and announced that this Scripture was now fulfilled. In today’s Gospel, we learn that the people of Nazareth are impressed by Jesus’ words, and yet they seem surprised. They still think of Jesus as merely Joseph’s son. They do not expect such words from someone they believe that they know. And so it is that the people of Nazareth knew Jesus very well. They saw him as a baby, they saw him as a child, they saw him as a young man, and they saw him as a carpenter, the son of Joseph the carpenter.

Early in his public life, Jesus went through Galilee, spoke in many towns and villages, and received a wonderful reception. And the expectations of the people began to grow that perhaps this was the long awaited Messiah and so it was that his reputation reached the place where he lived in Nazareth. Now Nazareth was not the place of Jesus’ birth, which was Bethlehem, but it was where he grew up and where Mary conceived him, because the Annunciation took place in Nazareth where Mary and Joseph lived.

And it was  here Jesus returns and the one in charge of the synagogue handed him the scrolls on which were the word of God

      “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
      because he has anointed me
      to bring glad tidings to the poor…….

      He said to them,
      “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”

What an incredible moment for them all. Because they had prayed for a thousand years and more for the coming of the Messiah. And their expectations were very high and also their hopes were high about messiah, but after hearing these words from the mouth of Jesus, they began to murmur, however, “No, this can’t be the Messiah.“We know his father, Joseph. He grew up with us. We saw him when he fell down and hurt himself, when he went crying to his mother, when he was sick, when he was perhaps maybe too arrogant sometimes and maybe not humble enough with his superiors other times.“We’ve heard rumours of certain things, but he was just an ordinary child who became an ordinary teenager and an ordinary man.“And what did he do? He was a carpenter.“Can this be the Messiah, the Anointed One of God, the one that we were praying and hoping for?”And so doubt set in. And then Jesus understood them. He knew that they were his people. He said, “Yes, it is true. Even the prophets were not accepted in their own town.”

The first thing we do is we ask, “Why is this?” Well, the reason why is maybe we’re too familiar with the people we know and it would be very hard to project a person among the people we know as someone who are calling themselves the Holy One of God, the Anointed One of God. And so they couldn’t accept him.

There’s another reason, though, why they couldn’t accept him. You see, we can have great expectations and expectations must breed faith. And then it all changes. Faith really demands a lot more than we ourselves give credit for. We keep saying, “Oh, I have faith in this,” and “I have faith in that,” or “I have faith in you.” That’s a good one: “I have faith in you.” But we really don’t have that much faith. It’s kind of like parceled out like spoons of sugar to make the coffee taste better. But the faith that Jesus is talking about here and now, and always spoke about, is something much, much deeper.

And so the first problem that not only is for the people of Nazareth to face, we too face it every Sunday. We accept him for being a great teacher and we give him adoration for being the Son of God, but will we jump in the barrow and live our lives the way he wants us to live?

The second thing  is: when we look at ourselves in our daily lives, we find another problem that Jesus faced in Nazareth, and that problem is everybody seems to know who you are. Have you ever noticed that? They have you kind of pinpointed and listed, and we look at people the way we want to look at them, and we sometimes project things into them that are not there, but we never get a real clear view of who they are. And sometimes we’re surprised. And we love to be surprised like that.

So when we leave church today and you begin to feel that you’re a Roman Catholic, think what it means. It doesn’t mean just to be baptised. It doesn’t mean just to be confirmed. It means Jesus saying, “Get in my wheelbarrow. Do you have that kind of faith? And I will ride you across chasms that you have never dreamed of.”

Fr. Showreelu Simham