14th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2021

Last Sunday, Mark’s Gospel gave us two brief cameos of people with faith. The first was a Jewish woman who had suffered from a chronic incurable haemorrhage for twelve years. The other was a distraught father of a dangerously ill young Jewish girl who, in the course of the incident, went on to die. The woman was healed from her haemorrhage when she touched Jesus’ clothes. The dead child was incredibly brought back to life by Jesus. To the woman Jesus commented that her faith, her trust in him, led not only to her healing but to wholeness. Faced with the death of his child, Jesus had invited the father to trust the unprecedented possibility of his child being brought back to life. “Courage”, Jesus said to him, “only believe”. He trusted; and Jesus brought the man’s child back to life.

Mark recounted the two incidents, not simply to rouse his readers’ interest or to illustrate for them the power of Jesus. Rather he wished to hold up for them a mirror of the kind of faith they also were called to cultivate as disciples of Jesus.

Something similar is going on with today’s story. Mark’s purpose was not to confirm his readers’ criticism and judgment of Jesus’ former hometown acquaintances. Rather, as in last week’s Gospel, he wanted to hold up a mirror for his readers, not for their imitation this time, but to alert them to the possibility of their unknowingly nurturing similar attitudes in their own hearts. Jesus’ home-town acquaintances, disappointingly, could not recognise the wisdom and power of Jesus that others were astounded by.

The sad thing is that it was a problem by no means special to them. It infects us all. In the case of the people of Nazareth, there was a further problem as well. Along with their unnoticed psychological blindness, there was a further aggravating problem of an unconscious sense of hostility. Listen to how Mark described their reaction: “Where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been granted him, and these miracles that are worked through him?” Their blindness was partly fed by a hardly-hidden jealously, that in turn led to a festering resentment. “This is the carpenter, surely, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joses and Jude and Simon? His sisters, too, are they not here with us?” How come he has been singled out and not themselves? Their resentment was fuelled as well by an assumption that, if he were special, that meant that they were not special. The result? “They would not accept him”. They “would not” — it was their choice. And they felt self-righteously justified in their reaction. Tragically, they were perfectly oblivious to the whole destructive dynamic.

Different expressions and degrees of the dynamic are present in all of us. That was why Mark was so concerned to mirror it as clearly, yet as gently, as he could to his readers, his fellow struggling disciples.

Two thousand years later, we are still so blind to much of how we feel and what we do and why. Our current world is seething with hidden envy and, accompanying it, anger. We polarise so quickly. We categorise others; we fail to let each other be the unique individuals that we all are. We close our ears to whatever they say, and are quite unwilling to possibly learn more and readjust our thinking or to move beyond our familiar prejudices. We are threatened by difference.

A question to take home with you: What was Jesus’ response to the challenge exemplified by his former childhood friends [but not limited to them]?