Third Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Peter

In the dining room of the home where I spent most of my childhood, there was a framed needlepoint decoration. On it was stitched the verse: “Cleaning and scrubbing can wait ‘til tomorrow, for babies grow up we learn to our sorrow.” We are a short three weeks from celebrating Jesus’ birth, and here he is today, all grown up, a local boy made good.

Jesus’ homecoming reminds me a bit of the first few times a young man or woman returns from college or from the service. There is great anticipation: the young person is missed in the town, among friends and family. There is also some trepidation: will he have changed? Well, of course he will. Jesus has been off with John the Baptist, perhaps imbibing new and radical teachings. We don’t know much about the inhabitants of Nazareth. The town stood only five miles distant from the major Galilean center of Sepphoris, a place where Greek was no doubt spoken and much trade went on. So citizens of Nazareth could hardly be complete rustics. Nevertheless, for a local carpenter suddenly to give up his trade and take up with the distant John the Baptist (he was over fifty miles south), would surely raise some eyebrows. So one can imagine the interest in what Jesus would say when it was now his turn to give a teaching on the haftorah, the reading from the prophet Isaiah. I felt a bit of this when I went home the week after my ordination: all of a sudden the kid that everyone remembers playing Little League is back from the monastery and preaching. What will he say?

What Jesus says continues the Epiphany or manifestation theme of the past few weeks. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” refers us back most immediately to Jesus’ baptism, a unique event in the ministry of John the Baptist. Jesus returns not a disciple of John, but as the one ‘mightier’ who baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire. If anyone picks up here that Jesus is suggesting that he is the Messiah, there might well be some misgivings: the city of Sepphoris which I just mentioned had sided with Judas the Galilean ‘at the time of the census’, that revolt mentioned by Gamaliel the Elder in the Acts of the Apostles. The result of this messianic uprising was the total destruction of Sepphoris. The city as it stood during Jesus’ adulthood was one rebuilt by Herod the Great.

So we can understand something of the apprehension that Jesus’ words might have caused. However, that is to foreshadow next week’s gospel, and Br. Brendan has been accusing me of stealing his homilies of late, so I will focus on the words of Christ today.

Let me ask you: how do feel when you hear Jesus saying in your hearing this morning, “He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind?” If we have something in common with the people of Nazareth, we probably are of two minds. Maybe today it sounds like good news and tomorrow sounds impossible. Our response depends in large part upon whether we see ourselves truly as poor, captives and blind.

I recall an excellent homily I heard about ten years ago on the passage where St. Paul exhorts Timothy to be ‘strong, loving and wise’. The homilist spoke for most of us when he said that there is a great (and dangerous) desire to see oneself and to be seen by others as ‘strong, loving and wise’. But here is our problem. Jesus does not come to announce glad tidings to the strong, liberty to the loving and sight to the wise. So take your pick: appear strong, loving and wise and be self-sufficient, not needing a Savior, maybe welcoming Jesus as a fellow friend and wise man; or learn to see yourself as loved by God, saved by the Incarnation of the Son of God who loves you, but understand that you are poor, captive and blind.

In the monastic refectory, we are almost halfway through a book called Befriending the Stranger by Jean Vanier. Vanier is famous for his work with the mentally and physically handicapped. His deep insight from his long experience is that we cannot love the weak, the hurt and the incapable unless we are able to expose for ourselves our own inner weakness, woundedness and incapacity. I would like to suggest that the great challenge for Christians today is to learn to serve the poor and the lonely in one another. There is something self-legitimating in caring for the physically poor, and in no way do I wish to suggest that it is easy or unnecessary.

The problem, as I see it, is that our individualistic mindset suggests that everyone, given the right opportunities and education, will and should make good. In the monastery, for example, we are all supposed to be good men. What do I do when my brother does something wrong again and again, even after I point it out to him and to the superior? Am I willing to love him with his flaws, or do I say, “Why doesn’t he fix that?” Or what do I make of the brother who is sullen and removed? Am I willing to love him, too? Or do I say, ‘well, what’s the bee in his bonnet?’ Even more difficult, am I willing to be loved by my brother if it means being, not strong, loving and wise in his eyes, but weak, poor and even blind?

This all sounds heavy and maybe a bit histrionic: St. Paul gives us a more positive perspective on all of this when he writes to the Corinthians, “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I do not need you’.” Rather, the eye should rejoice in its inability to do what the hand can do, for it is through this inability that the eye comes to need the hand and the body comes to take shape. Love, then, is learning to say, “I need you” to our fellow human beings. Not in co-dependency, mind you, but in the Body of Christ. All the parts of the body must be linked to the head: a hand and an eye can’t become all-dependent on one another: that would make for a gruesome body. Rather we rejoice in being united one to another in Christ.

Again, Christ throws out the challenge: will you welcome the Good News if it means having to say, “I need you,” even to our enemies? Vanier is helpful again here: what if the enemy, what if what we hate in the world is what is weak, captive and blind in ourselves? Can we turn to that place of emptiness and poverty inside and say, “I need you?”

We are in the midst of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. In his 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, Pope John Paul II noted that Jesus chose the Apostles not because they were strong but because they were weak, especially Peter, whom our Lord treated especially hard. Catholics face a temptation to feel self-sufficient: we have the fullness of the Faith we are told, and in a very narrow Magisterial sense, this is what we must somehow affirm. However, today’s liturgy suggests that we should approach ecumenism from a position not of strength, but of weakness, poverty, even blindness. Can we say to the Orthodox or to Protestants, “I have no need of you?” “By no means!” Can we instead learn to listen and to trust in such a way that we can discover our need for full communion in the Body of Christ and through this discovery acknowledge our weakness and incapacity to bring this communion about?

If we can, if the Holy Spirit grant us the courage to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, if we can love the poor and the captive within ourselves, then perhaps we will be among those who welcome the proclamation of Jesus Christ, “a year acceptable to the Lord.” To our One Lord Jesus Christ be glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit forever and ever. Amen.