A recording of today's blog and gospel can be accessed here.
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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?
When the same gospel
occurred last year, this
blog reflected on the reaction of the people. They were prevented from
hearing the vocation that Jesus offered them because a fantasy about their own
destiny stood in their way and made them deaf. This time around, let us ask
instead why they reacted so angrily that they were ready to commit murder.
Why do pious people become
sometimes so angry in the name of their faith? There is indeed a form of just anger when
it is in accord with right reason, but the people’s anger in this scene is not
of that kind. If we had asked the Nazarenes why they were angry, they would no
doubt have answered that Jesus’ implication about the privileges of the Gentiles
was a calculated insult to the chosen people of God. What else could He have
meant, they might ask, when all He emphasised were the unbelievers whom Adonai
in His mercy had sent Elijah and Elisha to help? Those of a more theological
bent might have added that this insult really sat atop a heresy that threatened
the meaning of the very covenant of God with His people. Jesus in this light would
be a preacher of error, a liar, and a threat to the faith of the town. The Law
forbade such blasphemy; better to punish Jesus now and rid Israel of His lies
before He did any further damage. Such might have been their justification, had
they been called on to justify their attempted assault on Him.
All that of course would have
been wrong headed for several reasons. Jesus was not delivering a calculated
insult; they should have known Him much better than that, and indeed they did.
Still, there are none so blind as those ready to take offence. Moreover, on a
theological level the position of the Jewish people in the Old Covenant was not
as exclusive as the Nazarenes’ reaction seemed to suggest; many moments in the
Old Testament indicate God’s plan to broaden His reconciliation with the world
beyond the confines of Israel, from the figures of Melchizedek and Ruth the
Moabite to the faith of Naaman and Jethro. So, if Jesus was not being
malicious, and if His views were hardly heretical, what was the cause of this
anger in the people of His native town? How might we explain it?
God alone knows the secrets
of the heart. We will perhaps learn on the day of judgement what passions and thoughts
drove this extraordinarily brutal display. But if we seek some hypothesis, beyond
the obvious one of offended pride, perhaps we might find it in the weakness of
otherwise faithful souls when human wounds are covered up by, or intertwined
with, theological or spiritual excuses. What did Jesus’ answer about Elijah
and Elisha require of them? It required them to cling a little less tightly, a
little less possessively, to their sense of being the Chosen People of God. But
then why were they clinging so tightly to it? It is not as if this was a mistaken notion: God had indeed chosen them. But why had its importance loomed so
large in their consciousness? Instantly, they would perhaps defend their
feelings on theological or spiritual grounds. This is what faithful souls do, they
might argue, the implication being: We do this action or that action because
we are so full of faith. Charity urges us. But is this the case? To be full
of faith is to be full of God, and where is the spirit of God in the angry mood
of a lynch mob? Where is the justice? Where is the fair hearing?
The anger of
imbeciles fills the world, as the
French writer Georges Bernanos was fond of saying, but perhaps that is a little
harsh. Yet Bernanos was aware, as some faithful souls are not, that while love
drives our fear, fear often impedes love. What were the Nazarenes afraid of
then? That again is their secret but might they have been afraid not so
much of Jesus’ blasphemy, as of their own crumbling faith? Here they were, living under Roman occupation, one more offence against the self-belief of
Israel to be God’s Chosen ones in a pagan world, and now here comes a
miracle-working preacher, indeed one of their own kind, challenging them to think
about God’s plans for that iniquitous world that was afflicting them. Jesus did
not offend their faith; He triggered their fear. He did not disrespect the Covenant
of God; He questioned their distortion of it, for their faith brought
comfort without bringing light.
The problem here was not
really the behaviour of the Nazarenes so much as what their behaviour
concealed from the world, deep down in their hearts. They were shaken day in and day out in their faith;
now Jesus was here to shake them some more. But why were they shaken? We have
said twice - but let us say it a third time - that God keeps the secrets of the
heart. But perhaps they were shaken because they had not known how to shine the
light of their faith into their deepest sense of insecurity. It is not enough to hold the truths of the faith; we must hold them with the spirit of God.
Perhaps we must not blame
them too much if this was the case. How brutalizing and damaging must it be to
live under occupation, to be always in danger of falling foul of an invader’s injustice,
and to see all this happen seemingly against the promises of the God to whom
one is dedicated. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? But
is this not our question also, we Christians of the twenty-first century?
The challenge for us, of course, is always to recognise that not only is the environment around us a strange
land; that we can hardly miss, and Jesus explicitly did not promise to make us
happy in this world. But more than that, this strange land is also found
within us. It is strange because it is made up not only of light but of
darkness; not only of the truths of God but also of our own false deductions,
and our tortured logic; not only of the truths of faith but of the hall of mirrors created by our vanity; not only of His merciful action, but also of our own wayward
attempts to save ourselves, trying to cauterise our wounded hearts when we
should be offering them in humility to God’s healing touch. We cannot save ourselves
after all, we who are the lowest of the low, the anawim, the widows of Sidon or the lepers of Syria.
But Jesus can lead us
out of captivity, restore our sight and set us at liberty, not only from the
world’s oppression but from our own.
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