14th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Ezekiel 2:2–5
Ps. 123:1–2, 2, 3–4
2 Corinthians 12:7–10
Mark 6:1–6
“Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you. But you shall say to them: Thus says the Lord God! And whether they heed or resist — for they are a rebellious house — they shall know that a prophet has been among them.”
One who speaks God’s word, a messenger of truth, must be ready for stiff opposition. We live in a world that certainly has this characteristic. When the culture embraces the narrow idea that every person can establish his or her own shaping of reality as “truth,” it is hard to find common ground. Our faith tells us that God is beyond this world and that He has shared a truth that holds everything together.
Jesus Himself experienced rejection, even from those who knew Him in Nazareth. His own relatives and neighbors took offense at Him for the wisdom He was sharing. Mark indicates that Jesus was deeply affected by this response and that He spoke clearly in the face of it. “Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.’ So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.
The difficulty seems to be that each one of us tends to shape our understanding of reality by our reactions rather than by a considered response. Human emotions are good in themselves, but they can get in the way of real understanding. Our sight, our hearing and our very experience of what happens around us is flavored by what we feel. We fail to grasp what the emotions offer and thus to get at what is really happening around us.
Jesus’ response to His village is revealing. First, He directly addresses the fact of the rejection and expresses that it has always been present in salvation history. Second, He pushes beyond it and performs healing that flows from His own touch. The good news is that eventually His own town did embrace the truth of who He is. Now, pilgrims can visit and pray in Nazareth at various sites associated with Jesus: The Basilica of the Annunciation, Joseph’s carpentry shop, Mary’s Well and other traditional locations. The “hometown boy” has made good. His own family members were among the first followers of the Risen Lord.
Our call is to persevere in faith and to stand true even when the world moves in the wrong direction. As the Responsorial Psalm suggests, we turn to the Lord with confidence: “Our eyes are fixed on the Lord, pleading for his mercy.” With Paul, we learn from the Lord: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” We acknowledge and accept our weaknesses in order that the power of Christ may operate in us. Paul expresses this: “Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”
Persevering in faith and in the witness to the truth, we give God a place in our world. Cooperating with His grace as we experience weakness, we discover a strength at work in us that can be found no other way.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that human beings are “connatural to the truth.” That is, we “fit” the truth, and when we acknowledge truth, we give it a place in our own being. The right answer to the world’s opposition is not to cast away truth or to call it into doubt. Or is it to reject the “rebellious house” among whom we live. Rather, we are to be prophets, speaking and living the truth, standing firm in faith. In this way, we let the world know that a prophet has been among us.
