When you reach a certain age you worry about things like your legacy, what you have done with your life and what would have happened if you had made different choices. There is something inside us that even unconsciously compares the outcomes of our life’s achievements with those of others. Physically, financially, spiritually we wonder why we are deficient, why our life hasn’t been marked with “more”: more beauty, more strength, more wealth, more success, more holiness…. Always more.
Hollywood and social media tickle this very human desire to be and to have more. It’s difficult to settle for being ordinary, unknown, insignificant, and not be a major player around whom everything revolves and on whom everything depends. As the years pass and we reach our senior years, this begins to feel a little desperate. We know instinctively that we are running out of time and opportunities to make “more” happen.
The people in Nazareth, the neighbors of Jesus’ mother who still remembered Joseph the carpenter every time they used something he had made for them, wanted more stardom in a prophet. Who does he think he is? We rub elbows with his mother at the village well. We know his family. They are our neighbors. They are just like us. They are no better than us. Who does this Jesus think he is?
Unknowingly, however, they were proclaiming the glory of the human race. God’s Son was born of a virgin, protected and raised by a foster-father who had a normal, everyday job. The Son of God is Emmanuel, God-with-us, God-in-our-midst, God who took flesh from a member of the human race, Mary, and who became a familiar presence as he grew up around the town of Nazareth.
This Gospel passage proclaims the humble origins of the Messiah and the way in which he has “woven” himself, if we could say it that way, into our very humble human reality. We can be sure that as Jesus stands before his Father in heaven, interceding for us, he knows. He knows our reality from the inside out. He understands every bit of our sorrows and the full extent of our joys. He lifts us up into communion with God where we make our forever-home in the Trinity, where we will be eternally “of God” and “in God.” This is what Jesus was inviting his neighbors to join him in, but they wanted more.
Jesus will seem to stumble into your very humble days. In ways that are far from magnificent, he will take up his home in you. As he does this, every day, listen to what he has to say. Let him tease your heart away from the earthly importance you seek, whatever it is, so that he can incorporate you into the glory of the divine life he wishes to share with you for all eternity.
Daily Reading
Tuesday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Reading 1 Ez 2:8—3:4 The Lord GOD said to me:As for you, son of man, obey me when I speak to you:be not rebellious like this house of rebellion,but open…
Saint of the Day
Pope Saint Pontian
Pope Saint Pontian, who reigned from 230-235, holds the distinction of being the first pontiff to abdicate.
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