14th Sunday Year B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2024

I find today’s Gospel quite challenging, following on, as it does, last Sunday’s Gospel, with its wonderful story of the healing of two “daughters of Israel” — the first, a desperate woman with an incurable haemorrhage that had troubled her for twelve years; the second, the dead twelve-year old daughter of the ruler of the local synagogue. Of the first Jesus had said, “Your faith has restored you to health”. Of the second, Jesus had encouragingly challenged the girl’s father, a representative figure of the Jewish establishment, to “only have faith”; and Jesus forthwith proceeded to restore the girl to life.

We can go back to two Sundays ago to the story of the weary, sleeping Jesus calming a storm at sea after being awakened by the boat-load of panicking disciples. On that occasion his sharp comment to them was: “How is it that you have no faith?” Quite a contrast!

Today’s story had Jesus back in his hometown, and had concluded sadly, “He could work no miracle there [though he cured a few sick people by laying his hands on them]. He was amazed at their lack of faith.”

Many of us these days are puzzled and worried by the noticeable drop in Sunday Mass attendance, perhaps particularly by the absence of the younger generations, maybe even members of our own families. We may feel puzzled, and cast around for whom to blame, wondering even about any guilt on our own part.

Blaming is not helpful. We can, however, profitably seek to understand, to look for reasons. The recent Gospels may throw some light on our search to understand.

The people of Jesus’ home town “were astonished when they heard him” — but in their case it was an unhealthy astonishment. "Where did the man get all this?” We can almost hear the aggrieved tone? “What is this wisdom that has been granted him? these miracles that are worked through him?”

The same wisdom and miracles had led people elsewhere also be astonished. But in their case, they had not known Jesus previously. There were no expectations at work. His wisdom and miracles were no threat to them. Rather, they had led them to be attracted by what they saw as his sense of inner “authority”.

Why the difference? For those of his own town, Jesus was different; he had changed. He had unconsciously challenged their expectations: “This is the carpenter, surely, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joset and Jude and Simon? His sisters, too, are they not here with us?” The result was, as Mark commented, “they would not accept him”. This was a community reaction, contagious, undiscussed, and seemingly unanimous.

Expectations, peer-pressure, influence us far more powerfully than we realise. What in our limited experience we have always known, we tend to take as natural and appropriate.

We older generations lived in a different world from the modern world in which the younger generations are living. Our experience of Church was part of our general experience of life as a whole. Generally we took it for granted, without necessarily thinking very deeply about it; perhaps, though we might have faithfully said our prayers and gone to Mass, without ever really relating personally, intimately, to Jesus. Conversion, change, rarely occurred with many of us.

Younger generations live in a different world. Their approach to life seems like what our approach was — taken for granted, without much deep thought about what and why they do things, but carried along, largely unthinkingly, like the rest of their peers. Conversion, change, is foreign to most of them — as it was to us.

To all of us, old and young, Jesus’ offer is constant: “Only believe!” “Your faith has restored you to wholeness!”