Book of Ezekiel 2,2-5. As the Lord spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard the one who was speaking say to me: Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their fathers have revolted against me to this very day. Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you. But you shall say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD! And whether they heed or resist--for they are a rebellious house--they shall know that a prophet has been among them.
Psalms 123(122) 1-2a.2bcd.3-4. - Our eyes are turned towards the Lord
To you I lift up my eyes who are enthroned in heaven -- As the eyes of servants are on the hands of their masters.
As the eyes of a maid are on the hands of her mistress, so are our eyes on the LORD, our God, till he have pity on us.
Have pity on us, O LORD, have pity on us, for we are more than sated with contempt; our souls are more than sated with the mockery of the arrogant, with the contempt of the proud.
Second Letter to the Corinthians 12,7-10. Brothers and sisters, that I paul might not become to elated, because of the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Mark 6,1-6. Jesus departed from there and came to his native place, accompanied by his disciples. When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. They said, "Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands! Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house." So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.
POPE FRANCIS ANGELUS 4 July 2021 Dear brothers and sisters, buongiorno!
This Sunday’s Gospel (Mk 6:1-6) tells us about the disbelief of Jesus’s fellow villagers. After preaching in other villages in Galilee, Jesus returned to Nazareth where he had grown up with Mary and Joseph; and, one sabbath, he began to teach in the synagogue. Many who were listening asked themselves: “Where does he get all this wisdom? But, isn’t he the son of the carpenter and Mary, that is, of our neighbours that we know so well?” (cf. vv. 1-3). Confronted with this reaction, Jesus confirms the truth that had even become a part of popular wisdom: “A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (v. 4). We say this many times…
Let us reflect on the attitude of Jesus’s fellow villagers. We could say they knew Jesus, but they did not recognise him. There is a difference between knowing and recognizing. In essence, this difference makes us understand that we can know various things about a person, form an idea, rely on what others say about that person, we might perhaps meet that person every now and then in the neighbourhood; but all that is not enough. This is a knowledge, I would say ordinary, superficial, that does not recognise the uniqueness of the person. We all run this risk: we think we know so much about a person, even worse, we use labels and close the person within our own prejudices. Jesus’s fellow villagers knew him for thirty years in the same way and they thought they knew everything! “But isn’t this the boy we saw growing up, the son of the carpenter and Mary? Where do these things come from?”. The distrust…in reality, they never realised who Jesus truly was. They remained at the exterior level and refused what was new about Jesus.
And here, we enter into the true crux of the problem: when we allow the convenience of habit and the dictatorship of prejudice to have the upper hand, it is difficult to open ourselves to what is new and allow ourselves to be amazed. We control: through attitudes, through prejudices… It often happens in life that we seek from our experiences and even from people only what conforms to our own ideas and ways of thinking so as never to have to make an effort to change. And this can even happen with God, and even to us believers, to us who think we know Jesus, that we already know so much about Him and that it is enough to repeat the same things as always. And this is not enough with God. But without openness to what is new and, above all – listen well – openness to God’s surprises, without amazement, faith becomes a tiring litany that slowly dies out and becomes a habit, a social habit.
I said a word: amazement. What is amazement? Amazement happens when we meet God: “I met the Lord”. But we read in the Gospel: many times the people who encountered Jesus and recognised him felt amazed. And we, by encountering God, must follow this path: to feel amazement. It is like the guarantee certificate that the encounter is true and not habitual.
-->In the end, why didn’t Jesus’s fellow villagers recognise and believe in Him? But why? What is the reason? In a few words, we can say that they did not accept the scandal of the Incarnation. They did not know this mystery of the Incarnation, but they did not accept the mystery: they did not know it. They did not know the reason and they thought it was scandalous that the immensity of God should be revealed in the smallness of our flesh, that the Son of God should be the son of a carpenter, that the divine should be hidden in the human, that God should inhabit a face, the words, the gestures of a simple man. This is the scandal: the incarnation of God, his concreteness, his ‘daily life’. And God became concrete in a man, Jesus of Nazareth, he became a companion on the way, he made himself one of us. “You are one of us”, we can say to Jesus. What a beautiful prayer! It is because one of us understands us, accompanies us, forgives us, loves us so much. In reality, an abstract, distant god is more comfortable, one that doesn’t get himself involved in situations and who accepts a faith that is far from life, from problems, from society. Or we would even like to believe in a ‘special effects’ god who does only exceptional things and always provokes strong emotions. Instead, brothers and sisters, God incarnated Himself: God is humble, God is tender, God is hidden, he draws near to us, living the normality of our daily life.
And then, the same thing happens to us like Jesus’s fellow villagers, we risk that when he passes by, we will not recognize him. I repeat that beautiful phrase from Saint Augustine: “I am afraid of God, of the Lord, when he passes by”. But, Augustine, why are you afraid? “I am afraid of not recognising him. I am afraid that when the Lord passes by: Timeo Dominum transeuntem. We do not recognize him, we are scandalised by Him, we think with our hearts about this reality.
Now, in prayer, let us ask the Madonna, who welcomed the mystery of God in her daily life in Nazareth, for eyes and hearts free of prejudices and to have eyes open to be amazed: “Lord that we might meet you!”, and when we encounter the Lord there is this amazement. We meet him in the normal: eyes open to God’s surprises, at His humble and hidden presence in daily life.
FAUSTI - "And he wondered about their non-faith" His people marvel at Jesus, and they are scandalized that the Wisdom and Action of God is in "this" man they know well. He too, in turn, was astonished: he came among His own, he was not received! With Jesus we find ourselves before the scandal of a God made Flesh, who is subject to the law of human toil and need, of work and food, of wakefulness and sleep, of life and death. We would like it to be different. We like to share His prerogatives: the less we like Him to share ours, which we would gladly do without. But "His Flesh" is the centre of the Christian faith. To recognize it or not is equivalent to being from God or not (1 Jn 4:2). In His humanity, in what He does and says, in what we do and undergo - in His concrete history, the mature fruit of Israel's journey - God reveals Himself and gives Himself definitively. In it it touches every man and from it springs forth His Wisdom and His saving Power. As a deep vein of perennial water gushes from the spring, so God comes out of Himself and communicates Himself to all through the Man Jesus of Nazareth. We say . "If I saw him, if I touched him, I would believe him!" Nothing more false! His parents refused him precisely because they saw him and touched him - indeed, crushed him. We always have the possibility of inventing one according to our fantasies. Faith is not to ascertain that Jesus is God - the God we think of!"- but to accept that God, the God we didn't think of, is this man Jesus. That God whom no one has ever seen, He has revealed to us (Jn 1:18). The scandal of faith, the same for all, is that the Wisdom and Power of God speaks and works in the madness and powerlessness of a love made flesh, which marries all our limits, to the extreme weakness of the cross. In fact, "he was crucified for his weakness" (2 Cor 13:4). How can the wonders of God be worked by his hands as a worker, who certainly, on the Sabbath, are as tired as ours? It is the scandal of the Christian faith: in the man Jesus, in all things similar to us, dwells corporally all the fullness of the Divinity (Col 2:9). "There is no prophet despised except in his own country." This is the bitter observation of Israel's refusal, behind which the refusal of humanity is looming. Faith is accepting Him as My God and My Lord. It is a contact that releases energy from Him. He is Life. Whoever has open hands receives the gift without any other measure than his need. Incredulity is the closed hand of those who, like his own, make rights and claims. The Lord, as he marvels at our unfaithfulness, marvels also at our faith (Mt 8:10). The use we make of our freedom is something new for Him, a source of amazement. Our faith or non-faith is the only thing that can amaze God, because it depends on us. He marvels when he is there and says: "How beautiful, I did not expect it!" It marvels when it is missing and says. "What more can I do?
D. FONTANA - Jesus arrives in Nazareth, the town where he was raised. A reputation precedes him as an itinerant preacher sought by the crowds and a miracle worker. On the Sabbath he attends worship in the synagogue, and here "he went about teaching." The effect on the audience: "Many were amazed." The episode opens and then closes under the banner of amazement. Usually in the Gospels, "amazement" is the feeling of those who have witnessed a miracle performed by Jesus and it almost always results in praise of God. Here in Nazareth, astonishment starts off well. Faced with the wisdom of their countryman, who had not attended the schools of the rabbis, they wonder, "What wisdom is that which has been given to him?" "Given" by God, it is understood. Their question seems, therefore, to be heading in the right direction. But, once they touch on the truth, they do not continue toward it, "Is not this the carpenter?" Here we have the fundamental question, which runs throughout Mark's gospel. The evangelist's intent is, precisely, to lead us to find the true answer to the question concerning the person of Jesus: Who is Jesus? Those who come into contact with Him in some way invariably feel the question about His identity surface. However, the problem is often not kept open in an attitude of serious research and reflection. The reasons: superficiality, fear of conversion? Either way, the rush to give an answer prevails. And this is in the wrong direction: they know His humble beginnings, they have seen Him grow up. They know all about Him: he is the "carpenter," having inherited the trade from his father Joseph. He is a good worker, like others in the village. They know his mother, "Is he not the son of Mary?" This is the only time in Mark's Gospel that the name of Jesus' mother recurs. Joseph is not named: perhaps he is already dead. They know his cousins. In short, his is an insignificant family. And so the amazement, instead of becoming enthusiastic faith, turns into unbelieving skepticism: "He was a cause of scandal to them." The root of such unbelief is precisely the inability to recognize God's presence and action in what is humble and everyday. The "scandal," that is, the obstacle to believing, stems from the fact that Jesus did not respond to their image of God: a God who, if he manifests himself, must do so in an obvious and spectacular. "And there he could perform no wonders there." Jesus has like hands tied. Unbelief blocks Him.
--->Miracles are not extraordinary gestures intended to impress people and force adherence to Jesus. They do not "produce" faith. The miracle is always a response to faith. It can only be "read" in the light of faith and is an appeal to faith: an appeal to the heart. That is why Jesus does not work any wonders, but heals only a few sick people to the extent of their faith. "And he marveled at their unbelief." Jesus feels deep discomfort and regret; he is "displaced." He is disappointed and embittered by the false religiosity of those who claim that God manifests Himself only in power and triumph, while not accepting that He intervenes in poverty and simplicity. Instead, with the Incarnation God penetrates humanity to the extreme limit, through a "carpenter," a man who suffers and dies an ignominious death. What grace that day for the people of Nazareth, when in their synagogue they were visited by Jesus and heard his word! What an occasion! A grace, an occasion that is repeated for us, especially when we are gathered for the celebration of the Eucharist and Jesus is in our midst. But they did not take him seriously: astonishment, instead of becoming gratitude and praise, became unbelieve. Even in our parishes, as in people's lives, Jesus would have a great desire to work miracles, to transform us. But he cannot, because we do not take seriously his word, his sacraments; we do not take seriously the gift he prepares for us every Sunday. That is why life often remains flattened and does not "explode." The Nazarenes did not have enough knowledge of Jesus, physical proximity and familiarity with Him to recognize His mystery. We, too, may allow ourselves to be played by the false presumption that we are familiar with Jesus, that we know everything about Him, but unable to overcome our own patterns to be alert to God's surprises. The statement, "A prophet is not despised except in his own country, among his relatives and in his own house," is disturbing. Jesus is quoting a proverbial phrase, but it refers to his fate. Even today it can happen to us as well that we fail to recognize God's presence and call through people who live beside us. And so we miss the opportunity God offers us to be converted to the Gospel. D. G. Fontana
Book of Ezekiel
RispondiElimina2,2-5.
As the Lord spoke to me, the spirit entered into me and set me on my feet, and I heard the one who was speaking
say to me: Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me; they and their fathers have revolted against me to this very day.
Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you. But you shall say to them: Thus says the Lord GOD!
And whether they heed or resist--for they are a rebellious house--they shall know that a prophet has been among them.
Psalms 123(122)
1-2a.2bcd.3-4.
- Our eyes are turned towards the Lord
To you I lift up my eyes
who are enthroned in heaven --
As the eyes of servants
are on the hands of their masters.
As the eyes of a maid
are on the hands of her mistress,
so are our eyes on the LORD, our God,
till he have pity on us.
Have pity on us, O LORD, have pity on us,
for we are more than sated with contempt;
our souls are more than sated
with the mockery of the arrogant,
with the contempt of the proud.
Second Letter
to the Corinthians 12,7-10.
Brothers and sisters, that I paul might not become to elated, because of the abundance of the revelations, a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.
Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me,
but he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me.
Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.
Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ
according to Saint Mark
6,1-6.
Jesus departed from there and came to his native place, accompanied by his disciples.
When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. They said, "Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands!
Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offense at him.
Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house."
So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.
He was amazed at their lack of faith.
https://youtu.be/TerbDxVQq-U?si=cPlrSz6Kgam2-0_4
EliminaPOPE FRANCIS
RispondiEliminaANGELUS 4 July 2021
Dear brothers and sisters, buongiorno!
This Sunday’s Gospel (Mk 6:1-6) tells us about the disbelief of Jesus’s fellow villagers. After preaching in other villages in Galilee, Jesus returned to Nazareth where he had grown up with Mary and Joseph; and, one sabbath, he began to teach in the synagogue. Many who were listening asked themselves: “Where does he get all this wisdom? But, isn’t he the son of the carpenter and Mary, that is, of our neighbours that we know so well?” (cf. vv. 1-3). Confronted with this reaction, Jesus confirms the truth that had even become a part of popular wisdom: “A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house” (v. 4). We say this many times…
Let us reflect on the attitude of Jesus’s fellow villagers. We could say they knew Jesus, but they did not recognise him. There is a difference between knowing and recognizing. In essence, this difference makes us understand that we can know various things about a person, form an idea, rely on what others say about that person, we might perhaps meet that person every now and then in the neighbourhood; but all that is not enough. This is a knowledge, I would say ordinary, superficial, that does not recognise the uniqueness of the person. We all run this risk: we think we know so much about a person, even worse, we use labels and close the person within our own prejudices. Jesus’s fellow villagers knew him for thirty years in the same way and they thought they knew everything! “But isn’t this the boy we saw growing up, the son of the carpenter and Mary? Where do these things come from?”. The distrust…in reality, they never realised who Jesus truly was. They remained at the exterior level and refused what was new about Jesus.
And here, we enter into the true crux of the problem: when we allow the convenience of habit and the dictatorship of prejudice to have the upper hand, it is difficult to open ourselves to what is new and allow ourselves to be amazed. We control: through attitudes, through prejudices… It often happens in life that we seek from our experiences and even from people only what conforms to our own ideas and ways of thinking so as never to have to make an effort to change. And this can even happen with God, and even to us believers, to us who think we know Jesus, that we already know so much about Him and that it is enough to repeat the same things as always. And this is not enough with God. But without openness to what is new and, above all – listen well – openness to God’s surprises, without amazement, faith becomes a tiring litany that slowly dies out and becomes a habit, a social habit.
I said a word: amazement. What is amazement? Amazement happens when we meet God: “I met the Lord”. But we read in the Gospel: many times the people who encountered Jesus and recognised him felt amazed. And we, by encountering God, must follow this path: to feel amazement. It is like the guarantee certificate that the encounter is true and not habitual.
-->In the end, why didn’t Jesus’s fellow villagers recognise and believe in Him? But why? What is the reason? In a few words, we can say that they did not accept the scandal of the Incarnation. They did not know this mystery of the Incarnation, but they did not accept the mystery: they did not know it. They did not know the reason and they thought it was scandalous that the immensity of God should be revealed in the smallness of our flesh, that the Son of God should be the son of a carpenter, that the divine should be hidden in the human, that God should inhabit a face, the words, the gestures of a simple man. This is the scandal: the incarnation of God, his concreteness, his ‘daily life’. And God became concrete in a man, Jesus of Nazareth, he became a companion on the way, he made himself one of us. “You are one of us”, we can say to Jesus. What a beautiful prayer! It is because one of us understands us, accompanies us, forgives us, loves us so much. In reality, an abstract, distant god is more comfortable, one that doesn’t get himself involved in situations and who accepts a faith that is far from life, from problems, from society. Or we would even like to believe in a ‘special effects’ god who does only exceptional things and always provokes strong emotions. Instead, brothers and sisters, God incarnated Himself: God is humble, God is tender, God is hidden, he draws near to us, living the normality of our daily life.
RispondiEliminaAnd then, the same thing happens to us like Jesus’s fellow villagers, we risk that when he passes by, we will not recognize him. I repeat that beautiful phrase from Saint Augustine: “I am afraid of God, of the Lord, when he passes by”. But, Augustine, why are you afraid? “I am afraid of not recognising him. I am afraid that when the Lord passes by: Timeo Dominum transeuntem. We do not recognize him, we are scandalised by Him, we think with our hearts about this reality.
Now, in prayer, let us ask the Madonna, who welcomed the mystery of God in her daily life in Nazareth, for eyes and hearts free of prejudices and to have eyes open to be amazed: “Lord that we might meet you!”, and when we encounter the Lord there is this amazement. We meet him in the normal: eyes open to God’s surprises, at His humble and hidden presence in daily life.
FAUSTI - "And he wondered about their non-faith" His people marvel at Jesus, and they are scandalized that the Wisdom and Action of God is in "this" man they know well.
RispondiEliminaHe too, in turn, was astonished: he came among His own, he was not received!
With Jesus we find ourselves before the scandal of a God made Flesh, who is subject to the law of human toil and need, of work and food, of wakefulness and sleep, of life and death.
We would like it to be different.
We like to share His prerogatives: the less we like Him to share ours, which we would gladly do without.
But "His Flesh" is the centre of the Christian faith. To recognize it or not is equivalent to being from God or not (1 Jn 4:2).
In His humanity, in what He does and says, in what we do and undergo - in His concrete history, the mature fruit of Israel's journey - God reveals Himself and gives Himself definitively.
In it it touches every man and from it springs forth His Wisdom and His saving Power.
As a deep vein of perennial water gushes from the spring, so God comes out of Himself and communicates Himself to all through the Man Jesus of Nazareth.
We say . "If I saw him, if I touched him, I would believe him!" Nothing more false! His parents refused him precisely because they saw him and touched him - indeed, crushed him.
We always have the possibility of inventing one according to our fantasies.
Faith is not to ascertain that Jesus is God - the God we think of!"- but to accept that God, the God we didn't think of, is this man Jesus.
That God whom no one has ever seen, He has revealed to us (Jn 1:18).
The scandal of faith, the same for all, is that the Wisdom and Power of God speaks and works in the madness and powerlessness of a love made flesh, which marries all our limits, to the extreme weakness of the cross. In fact, "he was crucified for his weakness" (2 Cor 13:4).
How can the wonders of God be worked by his hands as a worker, who certainly, on the Sabbath, are as tired as ours? It is the scandal of the Christian faith: in the man Jesus, in all things similar to us, dwells corporally all the fullness of the Divinity (Col 2:9).
"There is no prophet despised except in his own country." This is the bitter observation of Israel's refusal, behind which the refusal of humanity is looming.
Faith is accepting Him as My God and My Lord. It is a contact that releases energy from Him. He is Life. Whoever has open hands receives the gift without any other measure than his need.
Incredulity is the closed hand of those who, like his own, make rights and claims.
The Lord, as he marvels at our unfaithfulness, marvels also at our faith (Mt 8:10). The use we make of our freedom is something new for Him, a source of amazement.
Our faith or non-faith is the only thing that can amaze God, because it depends on us.
He marvels when he is there and says: "How beautiful, I did not expect it!" It marvels when it is missing and says. "What more can I do?
RispondiEliminaD. FONTANA - Jesus arrives in Nazareth, the town where he was raised. A reputation precedes him as an itinerant preacher sought by the crowds and a miracle worker. On the Sabbath he attends worship in the synagogue, and here "he went about teaching."
The effect on the audience: "Many were amazed."
The episode opens and then closes under the banner of amazement.
Usually in the Gospels, "amazement" is the feeling of those who have witnessed a miracle performed by Jesus and it almost always results in praise of God.
Here in Nazareth, astonishment starts off well. Faced with the wisdom of their countryman,
who had not attended the schools of the rabbis, they wonder, "What wisdom is that which has been given to him?"
"Given" by God, it is understood. Their question seems, therefore, to be heading in the right direction. But, once they touch on the truth, they do not continue toward it, "Is not this the carpenter?"
Here we have the fundamental question, which runs throughout Mark's gospel.
The evangelist's intent is, precisely, to lead us to find the true answer to the question concerning the person of Jesus: Who is Jesus? Those who come into contact with Him in some way invariably feel the question about His identity surface. However, the problem is often not kept open in an attitude of serious research and reflection.
The reasons: superficiality, fear of conversion? Either way, the rush to give an answer prevails. And this is in the wrong direction: they know His humble beginnings, they have seen Him grow up. They know all about Him: he is the "carpenter," having inherited the trade from his father Joseph. He is a good worker, like others in the village. They know his mother, "Is he not the son of Mary?" This is the only time in Mark's Gospel that the name of Jesus' mother recurs. Joseph is not named: perhaps he is already dead. They know his cousins. In short, his is an insignificant family. And so the amazement,
instead of becoming enthusiastic faith, turns into unbelieving skepticism: "He was a cause of scandal to them." The root of such unbelief is precisely the inability to recognize God's presence and action in what is humble and everyday. The "scandal," that is, the obstacle to believing, stems from the fact that Jesus did not respond to their image of God: a God who, if he manifests himself, must do so in an obvious and
spectacular.
"And there he could perform no wonders there." Jesus has like hands tied.
Unbelief blocks Him.
--->Miracles are not extraordinary gestures intended to impress people and force adherence to Jesus. They do not "produce" faith.
EliminaThe miracle is always a response to faith. It can only be "read" in the light of faith and is an appeal to faith: an appeal to the heart.
That is why Jesus does not work any wonders, but heals only a few sick people to the extent of their faith.
"And he marveled at their unbelief." Jesus feels deep discomfort and regret; he is "displaced." He is disappointed and embittered by the false religiosity of those who claim that God manifests Himself only in power and triumph, while not accepting that He intervenes in poverty and simplicity. Instead, with the Incarnation God penetrates humanity to the extreme limit, through a "carpenter," a man who suffers and dies an ignominious death.
What grace that day for the people of Nazareth, when in their synagogue they were visited by Jesus and heard his word! What an occasion! A grace, an occasion that is repeated for us, especially when we are gathered for the celebration of the Eucharist and Jesus is in our midst.
But they did not take him seriously: astonishment, instead of becoming gratitude and praise, became unbelieve.
Even in our parishes, as in people's lives, Jesus would have a great desire to work miracles, to transform us. But he cannot, because we do not take seriously his word, his sacraments; we do not take seriously the gift he prepares for us every Sunday. That is why life often remains flattened and does not "explode."
The Nazarenes did not have enough knowledge of Jesus, physical proximity and familiarity with Him to recognize His mystery. We, too, may allow ourselves to be played by the false presumption that we are familiar with Jesus, that we know everything about Him, but unable to overcome our own patterns to be alert to God's surprises.
The statement, "A prophet is not despised except in his own country, among his relatives and in his own house," is disturbing. Jesus is quoting a proverbial phrase, but it refers to his fate. Even today it can happen to us as well that we fail to recognize God's presence and call through people who
live beside us. And so we miss the opportunity God offers us to be converted to the Gospel.
D. G. Fontana