Amen, I say to you,
no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
In Nazareth they were impressed at the words of Jesus, and yet they were limited in their ability to make a response of faith to those words. There seemed to be two roadblocks to faith. The first was that they thought they knew Jesus insofar as he was the son of Joseph, someone who had grown up in their midst. Who did he now think he was to return to his home town with all of this pomp and presumption, acting as if he were a teacher and a prophet? Was he not instead just another one of them, with the same limits they all had, the same limits they believe they had seen applying to him when he was a member of their community? The second roadblock to faith seemed to be jealousy. They seemed to feel that if he had performed mighty deeds in Capernaum, if he truly was he who claimed to be, ought he not to have begun and kept his focus on Nazareth? Shouldn't the place he had grown up, and the people with whom he had grown, have a special claim on his heart? But there was precedence for this. It was often the case that outsiders had a sufficient distance from what God was doing to recognize it, whereas insiders, those in Israel, were too close and too complacent to understand or even to care.
Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel
in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years
and a severe famine spread over the entire land.
The idea that even Gentiles could find blessings that those in Israel could not was infuriating to the people at Nazareth. It was this sense of entitlement that made it difficult for them to welcome what Jesus was doing, combined with their jealousy that what had been done for others had not been done for them first. But Jesus revealed it was precisely in this way that God himself had often worked in history.
Again, there were many lepers in Israel
during the time of Elisha the prophet;
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.
We can see from Naaman the Syrian that even Gentiles often had problematic expectations that needed to be overcome in order to come to faith. But still, somehow the distance, that did not allow him to be overly familiar with or jealous of God's blessings seemed to aid in his setting these expectations aside when his servants suggested he do so.
But his servants came up and reasoned with him.
“My father,” they said,
“if the prophet had told you to do something extraordinary,
would you not have done it?
All the more now, since he said to you,
‘Wash and be clean,’ should you do as he said.”
On the one hand most of us are Gentiles and not Jews. But this does not automatically imply that we are now the ones who are open to what Jesus is doing. If anything it is quite the opposite for those us with his Church. We have grown up with Jesus in our midst. We believe we know him, where he is from, and exactly of what he is capable. We believe we will only see what we have seen before and do in fact feel a little jealous when someone claims to have seen something truly miraculous. When we are in need we think to ourselves, 'But I've never seen Jesus do that so he won't'. And then, incongruously, when someone tells us how Jesus touched her life or performed a work of healing or deliverance we think, 'Why not me?'
Even though at first we may be jealous of the work that Jesus seems to prefer to do in the lives of outsiders, this too is by design and can be helpful. If, instead of our jealousy moving us to violence, it moves us to seek him more, we too can benefit. The stories of outsider blessings help shake us from our insider complacence and lack of living faith. They are given because Jesus does in fact want to do in Nazareth and in our Church the mighty deeds he did in Capernaum and elsewhere. He is attempting to open us to them. Paul discovered this pattern and wrote about it in his Letter to the Romans:
Rather, through their trespass salvation has come to the Gentiles, so as to make Israel jealous. Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean! (see Romans 11:10-12).
What factors are limiting our own ability to welcome the Kingdom of Jesus in our midst? What presumptions do we have based on our history of years spent with him? Have we occasionally felt desirous of the blessings we see others receive, even so jealous as to harden our hearts to those blessings? Or do we expect that those blessings must come in a certain way, according to a certain formula with all of the right special effects as Naaman seemed to expect? Even in spite of such limitations of our imagination, what signs do we see that Jesus is alive and acting in our world today? Perhaps we can look more closely and come to desire and lean into this action rather than rejecting it in preference of our comfortable status quo. This is what Jesus himself desires, and his actions are meant in part to help awaken this thirst in us.
Athirst is my soul for the living God.
When shall I go and behold the face of God?
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