Off a Cliff

Monday's homily notes

“The door of heaven is closed by hatred.” -The Curé d’Ars

Reading: Luke 4:24-30

Jesus is in Nazareth, his hometown.

The crowds, some impressed and some bemused, didn’t know quite what to make of it. “Is this not Joseph’s son?” they asked (Luke 4:22). Whatever their reaction, it was not really faith.

Jesus had just preached from Isaiah a kind of jubilee. He claimed prophetic anointing, that the Spirit of God was upon him. Announcing release to captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed, when Jesus told them that in their very hearing this Scripture was fulfilled, to that they answered with bemusement, with interest, with a few nice words, but little more (Luke 4:18-22).

Again, not with faith.

Which raises the first set questions: How do you respond to the Gospel? With faith or with a yawn? Are we so familiar with Jesus and Christianity and Catholicism that we are no longer surprised by it? Are our prayers so familiar, the stories so familiar, that we don’t see how radical the Gospel is?

You see, the people at Nazareth thought they knew Jesus, but that’s exactly what spiritually blinded them, what kept them from faith. Maybe we should pray to be surprised by the God we think we know.

But be careful.

I mean, keep reading the story.

The people respond to Jesus with something less than faith, and so he says to them, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his own country” (Luke 4:24). But then he goes on to tell stories from 1 and 2 Kings. The story from 2 Kings, today’s first reading, is what’s relevant at present. It’s the story Naaman the Syrian. It’s a great story; you should read it.

Now the point of the story, from Jesus’s perspective, is that Naaman was a foreigner, an outsider. Yet he was healed of his leprosy because he believed the prophet. Unlike the people in Jesus’s hometown, the foreigner responded to the prophet with faith. Which is why he was healed—because he accepted the prophet.

But this is the line which really turned the crowd against him: “And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian,” Jesus said. That’s when the crowd was “filled with wrath,” when they tried to throw him off a cliff (Luke 4:27-29). When Jesus suggested that faith mattered more than status.

Hence a second set of questions: Do you rely on your status as a Catholic or a Christian more than on a lively faith in Christ? Do you think your status as a certain kind of Catholic sets you apart for distinct blessings? Do you look down on converts? Does it bother you that God may love someone you hate?

I mean, pick someone you don’t want to be in heaven with, and there’s a good chance you won’t be. “The door of heaven is closed by hatred,” the Curé d’Ars said. Be careful with that hate of yours.

Faith over status, love over envy: these are today’s themes, today’s challenges. For we’re in a sort of Nazareth too.