Vocation vs faith fantasy

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Today’s gospel (Luke 4: 16-30) relates the visit of Jesus to his own town of Nazareth. He reads in the synagogue and preaches on a text of Isaiah. Having at first amazed them, He then upsets the people with His commentary, and becoming enraged they turn into a lynch mob and set out to hurl Him off a local cliff, only to find that He has slipped their grasp and escaped. The level of detail in the synagogue scene is remarkable, evidently an eye-witness account. Was the Blessed Mother there or one of His disciples?

What is this strange tale of preaching and attempted lynching really about? Here are the townspeople, piously praying in their synagogue one moment, and the next, flying into a persecutory rage and attempting to kill a man whose sermon they began by admiring. Here they are one moment wrapped in holy devotion, and the next exploding with violent anger. How did their Dr Jekyll become their Mr Hyde? 

Perhaps the secret to their rage is that Jesus’ commentary on their situation did not live up to the self-admiring perceptions they had about themselves. Jesus dispels these perceptions indirectly by reminding them of the fact that Elijah and Elisha, two of the holiest of the prophets, brought help and relief to Gentiles. After all, if the Jews were God’s chosen people, what could Jesus mean by citing these cases, other than to thumb His nose at their dignity, or so they might have thought? They were angry not because Jesus had offended God; they were angry because He had pulled down the idol they had unwittingly made of themselves in their own hearts. They were angry because, instead of hearing His call to them, He dissolved the comfortable religious delusion which cushioned their convictions.

In one sense, this passage is all about vocation. For our personal vocation is not primarily about what we do, but about how we individually are called to receive and reflect God’s goodness and holiness. The first question of our existence is not what we should do in this life, but what does He call us to be in ourselves? Yet, we cannot so receive and reflect God’s goodness without first listening to His call, which liberates us from those refusals that keep us captive and dispels the blind spots through which we try to write our own life story. Liberation and illumination, a heart free to bask in His loving goodness and a mind blessed to embrace His truth: these are the favours of the year of the Lord. From these fundamentals, the question about what we must then do can be seen in its true light.

So, what is the problem that the Nazarenes are suffering from? They are suffering from a kind of faith fantasy which is almost the opposite of vocation. They do not miss their vocation by irreligiosity; this is crucial. They miss it by having a false perception of God’s intent for them through which they unwittingly envisage not His glory but their own. They miss it by shoddy self-serving deductions based on what they suppose – superficially - it must mean to be God’s chosen ones. Not all those who say ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven.

They have all the words of God’s revelation, but they wear them like children dressed in grown-ups clothing. Or rather, they come to the banquet but make a grab for the top seats - why else would they have been invited? They have heard the first lines of the story and imagined they were called to a starring role in it, not understanding that every beauty, great or small, is a jewel in God’s eyes, for His beauty is infinite and infinitely to be reflected in the work of His hands. Their entitlement to perceived privilege has built up their expectations, and when Jesus fails to meet those expectations, they lash out. They longed for the glory of the noisy spectacle - of having a miracle worker bringing renown to their village - only because they had missed the glory of the silent reality of God's call. Perhaps they longed for the extra trade a bit of spectacle would bring in. How the mighty are cast from their thrones!

After the lie that we will be like God, the lie the devil likes to tell people of faith most often is that they will be the great, that they will be significant; that if they just try hard enough to align all the signs, they can glimpse God's intent that destines them to sit at the left and right of the Messiah in His kingdom. Like the God of the gaps in a half-understood universe, they are the hero of a drama that seems to unfold for their own self-realisation; they find two spoons that fit together and believe this betokens a providential destiny, as if spoons never otherwise matched. They do not listen to God's call; they try to author their own. 

To hear one’s vocation it would be infinitely better to beg the grace of being anawim, the little ones, of the Lord. Living that truth of our lives - accepting the new sight of grace and its liberation -  we might then be free to receive and reflect God’s goodness as He so desires, reciting our Magnificat with Mary whose personal pronouns are yes and thank you, not I and me, me, me. In the great choral symphony that sings to His beauty, God’s choicest glories will be gifted to those He chooses, but His blessings are for all those who would receive them.