Dear Family,
Jesus was coming into his home town. Let me tell you, the service that night was jammed. There wasn’t room to park all the donkeys outside. They ran out of bulletins. They put benches up in the center of the aisles. It was crowded, because the “local rabbi made good” was coming back to town. Jesus came into the crowded service that night, and the worship service had an order much we like have on Sunday. As the guest of honor Jesus was to read any passage in the Old Testament prophets. The passage he chose, Isaiah 58, revealed his core values and his ministry. Jesus read: “The Lord God has appointed me to preach good news to poor people, to heal the blind and sick, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus then closed the book. There was a looooong silence, and he said: “These words are fulfilled in your hearing.” Then he preached a sermon on that text, and afterwards, the Gospel of Luke says that “everyone spoke well of him and wondered at his gracious words.” Others exclaimed, “Where did he get so wise?” ….. But yet there were others who murmured and grumbled, “Isn’t this the son of Mary and Joseph? He is just the common kid from Nazareth. There is nothing special about him.” So Jesus must have said something that really got on their nerves. What was it that Jesus said that offended them so deeply that in the Gospel of Luke, they took him up to a hilltop and tried to kill him?
Obviously, the hometown folk couldn’t believe that one of their own children could actually be a prophet. Jesus was suggesting that he was even more than a prophet. He was claiming that he was the long awaited Messiah. Many of the townspeople argued, “How can little Jesus of Nazareth come back and claim to be the Messiah? How could God come in such a common and ordinary way through the son of a carpenter? Jesus certainly doesn’t measure up to our expectations of what it means to be a messiah.” The people were offended by the Incarnation, that God actually became a human being. That was the scandal, the stumbling block.
O yes, we can believe in the face of God behind the universe, of spirituality or morality. But to believe that God could come to us through some neighborhood boy seems to be pushing it. And that is what so deeply offended the people. The Incarnation: that God would come in the flesh of a man they knew, a man by the name of Jesus from the town of Nazareth.
Let me give you an example where God comes to us so commonly that we don’t hear God. God comes through a person or persons as near to us as our family members and friends. And yes – God speaks to us through children. And so what I am trying to suggest to you is that God consistently comes to us and talks to us in common and ordinary ways, so much so, that we often don’t even hear the voice of God. Instead, we are looking for some divine intervention. God comes to us in such ordinary ways, that sometimes we miss the voice and face of God.
God Bless You –
Fr. Valentine