Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 29, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
January 29, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when we will once again join those in the Nazareth synagogue after Jesus reveals himself to them as the Messiah. It’s not a tranquil conversation. In fact, after the dialogues that took place before Pontius Pilate and on Calvary, it may be one of the most difficult colloquies in the Gospel. But it is important for us to enter into the drama, because the rejection of Jesus by those in his hometown is not only a prelude to what he endured in the Passion but also what can happen whenever we, and others, don’t want to accept Jesus on his own terms but try to box him into our own safe categories.
• This scene this Sunday is a continuation of what began last week when Jesus, arriving on the Sabbath in his hometown synagogue, was invited by the Chazzan, the synagogue leader, to read a passage of God’s word and to give a commentary. By this point, Jesus already had a reputation throughout Galilee for teaching with authority unlike any had ever heard. He was becoming famous especially for the miracles he was working, like casting out demons and curing the sick and the paralyzed. Jesus unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, read one of the most famous passages referring to the Messiah for whom the Jews had long waited and gave a once sentence homily, that Isaiah’s words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, … to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” were being fulfilled in their hearing.
• Mark and St. Luke both tell us that the listeners’ first reaction to Jesus’ teaching was astonishment. They were amazed at the “gracious words that came from his mouth” and “the wisdom that had been given to him,” both of which were probably very much on display in the way he read the words of Isaiah that he, the Word of the Father, had inspired seven centuries before. But that quickly changed once they began to reflect on what he said. First, Jesus was saying that he was the Messiah. That couldn’t be, they thought, because they knew him, they likely had pieces of furniture he made, they remembered him playing with themselves or their kids when he was younger. They didn’t believe, on the basis of Scripture and experience, that anything good, not to mention the Messiah, could come from Nazareth. “Is this not Joseph’s son?,” “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?,” they derisively asked aloud. Second, if the Scripture passage that their long-time neighbor and local construction worker had read was being fulfilled in their hearing, and he had come to proclaim the Gospel to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, then they naturally began to ask themselves whether he was saying theywere poor, captive, blind and oppressed.
• Rather than engaging their consciences, however, to see if what Jesus was saying might be true, rather than humbly asking, “What should we do?,” St. Mark tells us that they began to ask him to put a show there of healing like they heard he had done in the Synagogue of Capernaum. Jesus not only didn’tdo miracles there but St. Mark says he couldn’t— except for the healing of a few sick persons — because of their “lack of faith,” which left Jesus stupefied and basically knocked the wind out of him. To try to convert them and provoke them to faith, Jesus described two pagans whose faith led to great miracles from the prophets Elijah and Elisha, but they refused to engage. Their doubts quickly multiplied and, as St. Mark describes, they began to “take offense at Jesus.” They not only refused to believe in what Jesus said, but they were affronted by it, because if he were the Messiah, it would necessarily change everything, their relationship with him and, in fact, their whole lives. Jesus knew their thoughts, St. Luke tells us, and said, “No prophet is acceptable in his hometown.” That “filled them with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff, but he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” In a series of reactions that would later be recapitulated in Jerusalem, when the mobs would pass from crying out, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” to “Crucify Him!,” within the span of a few days, these good Nazarenes — people who went to the synagogue religiously on the Sabbath — went in just a few minutes from praising Jesus and amazement, to doubts, to taking offense at him, to trying to kill him. In the beat of an eye, they went from praying in the synagogue to trying to murder their guest preacher. Not only would they not accept Jesus as a prophet by heeding his words and welcoming him as they would the God who sent him, but they, like preceding generations whom he said elsewhere “kill[ed] the prophets and stone[d] those … sent to it” (Mt 23:37), would seek to kill him. In other cities, strangers who didn’t know him growing up were willing to leave everything to follow him, were moved and converted by his preaching, and were amazed by his miraculous power such that they with faith were bringing to him all those who needed help. But among his own, he was rejected and deserving of death.
• How is this possible? How could people who were regulars at the synagogue and the temple, who seemed hungry for the word of God, who “spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” all of a sudden seek to killhim? Why wouldn’t they just have ignored him? The reason is found in St. John’s prologue: “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him. … The light came into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” They didn’t want a real Messiah, even or especially if he were a native son, because a real Messiah would necessarily change them. The real Messiah was a threat to their self-dominion, to their comfortable routines. They had come to the synagogue to fulfill their religious duties, not to have their lives changed — and changed forever. In the final analysis, they preferred not to have Scripture fulfilled in their hearing, not to hear the good news, not to be set free from their self-imposed prisons, not to be cured of their spiritual blindness. They preferred to live in their darkness rather than be provoked, then and there with urgency, to come to the light. Because Jesus spoke and acted with an authority that didn’t allow a simple refusal, because his message couldn’t stop reverberating in their synagogue, in their ears, in their conscience, the only way to eliminate the message he was proclaiming was, they concluded, to eliminate the messenger. Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin would fulfill the rejection later.
• What happened in the Synagogue in Nazareth is instructive for us as we prepare to go to meet Jesus on Sunday. We are his own people, the equivalent of modern Nazarenes. Through baptism, we have become true members of Jesus’ family, his spiritual brothers and sisters. Through the Eucharist, we become, we can say, his blood relatives. Many, perhaps most, of us have grown up with the Lord our whole lives. We’re literally “familiar” with him. As with our other relatives, we have pictures of him at home, celebrate his birthday every December, and mark the most important moment of his life each spring. The question for us is whether we, like the majority of ancient inhabitants of Nazareth, allow our familiarity with Jesus actually to weaken, rather than strengthen, our faith. Do we allow our greater contact with Jesus to make us take him for granted or to help us grow in love for him? When he says something that challenges us to leave our comfort zones, to convert, do we listen to and follow him as Messiah, or do we marginalize him and through continuing in a life of sin do things that lead ultimately to what happened to him on Golgotha? When he comes to us hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned, do we care for him or cast him aside? When he teaches us that whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters we do to him, do we therefore care for him in the littlest of his brethren, those growing in the womb, or do we look the other way when some want to celebrate their slaughter as a huge advance in human rights? When Jesus speaks to us about purity of heart or about the importance of marriage in God’s plan from the beginning as the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, do we order our lives to the truth or do we prefer the Barabbas of the sexual revolution? When he teaches us about loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, forgiving 70 times 7 times, seeking first his kingdom, and picking up our cross daily and following him, do we strive to live by the light of those words or do we ignore them? The biggest question of our life is whether we will welcome, embrace and love Jesus as a prophet, the Messiah, the Savior, the Way, the Truth and the Life or whether we will ignore, reject, or even ultimately, like those in Nazareth and later in Pilate’s courtyard, seek to snuff him out.
• On the Christian sabbath, the same Jesus who out of love came to his own in Nazareth, comes to our parish Churches, to us who have not just become his hometown but his temples. He comes for a consequential conversation, a life-changing encounter. He teaches us in Sacred Scripture, which is always fulfilled by Him live in our hearing. He awaits our embracing him in faith and letting His word take flesh in us. He comes to be received by us like Mary and Joseph of Nazareth received him. Let us through their intercession pray for the grace to meet him as he desires and deserves and have his word fulfilled not just in our hearing but in our whole life.

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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