Vocation, not self-promotion

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed via this link.

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Today’s gospel (Matthew 13: 54-58) recounts an episode in which Jesus visits Nazareth and finds the population sceptical about His ministry. Where did this man get his wisdom and these mighty works? they wonder. Their questions come thick and fast, and before long the mood grows dark: They took offence at him. Jesus’ response to this precipitous judgement was philosophical but also practical. A prophet is not without honour except in his home town, He concluded, and He performed few miracles for them, the gospel says, because of their unbelief.

Sometimes, human beings are sunk simply by their own shortcomings. Here is Nazareth, the neediest of Israel’s villages, well known as a place of dishonour. And yet, instead of celebrating their local celebrity, the people were filled with scepticism at Jesus’ works. Was it not right to ask questions? Of course, it was. Was it not a normal requirement to discern well in such circumstances? Without a doubt. So, why did the Nazarenes go so wrong in the process?

The clue might be found in this gospel’s subtext, what lies beneath the surface. Where did this man get his wisdom? only appears to be a fair inquiry. Yet behind it is a kind of jealous attack. It is not Jesus’ wisdom that they were inquiring about. They were reacting instead to the very fact of it, like neighbours who react and say: have you seen what the Jones’s have done now? After that first question, therefore, every other inquiry was an attempt to demean the Messiah in their midst: Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? Yet again, we must read the subtext, the thing that lies beneath the surface: these questions were rhetorical, not genuinely interrogative. They were not about what they were about. They did not seek information. Rather, they sought to make the point that whatever Jesus had done, He was simply a local boy and didn’t deserve the acclaim. And there is the wayward human heart in a nutshell, souring like milk in the warm summer sun.

Jesus cannot heal us until we have fully recognised how broken we are, but we cannot fully recognise how broken we are when we are jealously comparing ourselves to others. The crowd’s questions almost amount to asking: why should we not be just as renowned as Jesus? Jealousy manifests itself in different ways; in the impious, it is simple, raw, and aggressive, as it is in this scene. In the pious, it might show itself through flattery or imitation or in an ill-disguised competitiveness for heavenly glory. But both categories of people are moved by the same force from within, the same instinct to want to show that they are as good as the one they are jealous of, or at least that those they are jealous of are no better than them. Perhaps it is because they do not know their own worth for only those who neglect their worth in God’s eyes look upon the qualities of others as a measure of their own failings.

But what is the measure of who we are, of what we are to become, and indeed of what we are worth? Are these things not determined by our vocation: our personal vocation, calling us to be our very own reflection of the goodness and beauty of our divine Creator, and our life’s vocation, calling us to some particular path of living? Instead of finding our guide in these two realities, we often allow who we are and what we are worth to be shaped by so many other forces in the human game of inauthenticity: by social pressures – the kind that the crowd try to exert in this gospel – or by covetous pursuit when we run towards not what God calls us to be but towards the thing that most seems attractive to us: wealth, fame, influence. Instead of vocation, we seem to aspire to self-promotion. But the truth is that we are least ourselves when we most wish to seem and to grab.

Nazareth of Our Lord’s day is the anti-culture of vocation: it is not interested in hearing God’s call, nor in honouring God’s call in others. To dwell spiritually in the Nazareth of England in the living holy house of the heart, proposes another way.