My mother was a very perceptive person with strong opinions about a lot of things. And she could be very quotable, in fact, some of her quotable quotes are still part of my interior life. At various times, when she saw someone getting out of line, doing or saying something that showed that the perpetrator didn’t understand his appropriate position in the universe, whether it was someone close by or even someone on the national scene, you’d hear her say, “Who does he think he is?” Or, if you were way out of line yourself, you might be unlucky enough to hear her say, with a penetrating look, “Who do you think you are?”
I’m afraid that came to mind immediately when reading this week’s gospel, about Jesus returning briefly to his home town not long after beginning his public ministry. You might remember the gospel from last week, where Jesus has amazed everyone somewhere else with miraculous healing cures, attracting a huge crowd that wants to follow him around to see what happens next. But now he is home, among people who saw Jesus grow up, who knew his ordinary and imperfect relatives and friends, still living there going about their very mundane occupations, the way he used to himself. And the situation here is completely different.
This gospel of Mark is very firm on the point that it was Jesus’s own relatives and neighbors who rejected him most firmly. In fact, it seems they even sapped the ability to work miracles out of him, by refusing to accept that he could be so different from what he had seemed to be before. The gospel here says that they “took offense” at him, but another translation puts it that they simply couldn’t get over it, that he was too much for them to take, they were scandalized by him. They were sure he was only ordinary. And he, in turn, was enormously frustrated by them.
Part of the message here is maybe just the old proverb that familiarity breeds contempt. Or maybe we recognize another old story, that sometimes you do just need to get away from home in order to become something else. But there’s something bigger in this story about Jesus and the small town. This gospel is also about where we are expecting to see God and where we are not.
The hardest thing for people to accept about Jesus while he was alive, and maybe the hardest thing to accept now, is that although he was God, he was also human like us. We would find God easier to believe in if he came up like thunder and overwhelmed us, if God could be so different from us, and so powerful, that believing in him would pick us up and sweep us along like a huge crowd following a celebrity on tour. We wouldn’t be able to resist it. That’s what we want, and we rarely see it. God is different from us, and powerful, but if the gospel means anything it’s that God is present in the carpenter who looks surprisingly like your actual carpenter, there every day going about his business.
We call it the mystery of the incarnation, and it’s the greatest news ever for Christians, because it means that wherever we go in suffering, in hurt and sorrow, God has gone there first in all that ordinary human territory, and is there with us. But that incarnation also means that God’s presence can be just as difficult for us to recognize as it was for the people of Nazareth, who assumed that if good news were going to come to them it would be from far away and look very, very different from what they actually got.
Instead, what we they got, and what we have, is the everyday. Our blindness is our inability to see God in what is already here. It may be that the person we really need to hear, who needs us most, the one who is calling us to follow Christ, can be the person we already know, maybe the one whose imperfections annoy and frustrate us most. The mission we are looking for in life may turn out to be in work that we have already found but perhaps forgotten about, because something else seemed so much more important or rewarding or spectacular.
It is all so ordinary. And yet as Paul says in that second reading, weakness and imperfection is where we should be expecting God, that weakness is where God chooses to show his strength. When we begin to believe that, when we seek God in the ordinary, daily people and places and ups and downs, we might find that God has given us overwhelming signs of his presence, in people who are not who we always thought they were, right here all the time, unnoticed we thought someone or something else would be the thing that would transform us.
We’re reluctant to notice the everyday, to open our hearts to it, it takes study and prayer, and it also means giving up some of that “who do you think you are?” attitude that governs who we listen to. Like these citizens of Nazareth in the gospel, the voice we need to hear and the word you need to act on might be undiscovered, right there next to you.