A dangerous lack of self-knowledge

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be found here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 6: 1-6) sees Jesus back in his hometown, preaching as He did elsewhere, but finding the people incredulous. After all, they knew Him, did they not? He was just Jesus, the carpenter’s son. They knew his nearest and dearest relatives. What on earth, they wondered, did He think He was up to, swanning around the place talking like a prophet? And so, Jesus worked few miracles there, and turned to other villages instead.

              In the middle of this scene, there are at least two mysteries that deserve reflection, and that give us cause for being humble. The first is that, often, the hardest thing to evangelise within us is the thing that is closest and most familiar to us. We take it for granted that we know ourselves, that we cannot be surprised by ourselves. Here, Jesus is among His own people who find it impossible to accept that they had misunderstood such a familiar figure, one of their own. They were wedded to the familiar so much – they had problematized it to such an extent– that to see its mystery was beyond them, as it is often beyond us. Affirming command of our surroundings, the sense of knowing our nearest and dearest: these things are part of our security. We do not like to think the unknown can get so close to us. It upsets our sense of safety; we are unprepared for its strangeness. But lo and behold, here is the Unknown among us, and unless our hearts are ready for it, we do not turn to face the mystery, and, by the same token, the mystery does not bring us the light we need. Our lack of awareness then should keep us humble; without humility, we risk letting the unknowns remain unknown.

              While this first lesson is an uncomfortable one, the second lesson is sobering. Why doesn’t Jesus just try harder with the Nazarenes? Surely, the thing to do in the face of such incredulity is to perform the big miracles. That way, they will believe, won’t they? Where does this refusal to go the extra mile come from in the Lord? After all, He has come down to earth for them; why not just grant them a glimpse of the power that lies within to defeat their resistance? Or why not organise some tables and chairs and conduct a conversation in the Spirit with the villagers, a pre-evangelization jamboree? He spends half the night talking to Nicodemus.

              To a great extent, the Lord’s choices in this moment are a mystery to us. Yet, perhaps it is something to do with His timing. Some people suppose that everyone else should share their culture with its sensibilities and customs. Others make a similar assumption that everyone lives in the same historical moment. Be wary of those who speak of the ‘modern world’, as if the modern world were as identifiable as a piece of self-assembly Ikea furniture or a flip calendar. Some of us are simply not the contemporaries of others; our mentalities, our virtues and vices smack of another age that only partially shares the contours of our own. For some of us, the parochialism of the present day is as dark as any of the supposed dark ages, while those who boast of their fresh innovations are unwittingly pale imitators of yesterday’s fashions. Yet the moment we live in is defined less by our preferences than by our unconscious biases. As we have said already, we can be strangers to ourselves.

The Lord knows all this. Nazareth will have another moment, but it will not be now. Now, the Lord will go and preach elsewhere. Like the first mystery, this second mystery then is another reason to remain humble lest we miss the Lord’s passing, the moment that God has chosen to intervene in our lives.

Jesus passed on, therefore, to other villages, but I wonder if, before He left the area, He looked back on that village of His youth and shed a tear or two over its resistance, saying:

If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.