Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time Cycle C January 30, 2022

 Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time   Cycle C          January 30, 2022

     Do you like this Gospel?     For me, not so very much.   Jesus starts out fine.  He goes to his home town of Nazareth, preaches in the Synagogue, is a hit and all speak highly of Him. *  But Jesus just can’t leave well enough alone.  He’s always got to mess it up, and by the end of the passage the town’s people are so enraged and furious with Jesus they want to do Him severe bodily harm and throw Him off the brow of the hill on which their town had been built. 

And why?   Well, Jesus tells them about the widow of Zarephath miraculously helped by Elijah the Prophet, and the leper Naaman of Syria who was miraculously cured by the prophet Elisha.  Now both recipients of the miraculous favors were pagans, not Jews, not any part of God’s Chosen People.  In short, not us, but those people.   So Jesus is pointing out to His fellow towns people that they are not God’s only favored people, but that God loves ALL people.   And the Jews thought they were SPECIAL.  Jesus rains on their parade of being “special”. 

Why didn’t Jesus just keep His mouth shut when He was ahead?   Why deliberately antagonize these folk?  Why go out of His way to poke them?   //

More importantly, is Jesus likely to do this same sort of disturbing, upsetting thing with you and me?     //

YES!   I am afraid so.  Because that is what Jesus does.

You see the people of Jesus’ town were comfortable in their narrow ideas and their narrow understanding.  They narrowly believed that they were God’s Chosen, that they were special, and they were better than

those hopeless heathen pagans. 

And Jesus blew that all up, because God loves everyone.

Jesus does the same for you and me.   If we think that we are special and favored of God because we are Catholic, or because we are American, or are wealthy, or we are male, or white, or Texan, or in-the-know, or woke, or sensitive, or even because we belong to St. Austin’s and not to one of those lesser diocesan parishes, or whatever, Jesus will do you the favor of disabusing you of your sense of superiority.      Thank you Jesus!

Why does Jesus, like the proverbial bull in a china shop, go out of His way to smash all our little conceits, our precious little images of ourselves as special and favored and better than other people?  //  Because that sort of pride blocks love.

St. Paul in our beautiful second reading today instructs us: “Love is patient, love is kind.  It is not jealous, it is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth.  It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never fails.”   

You see, Love is work.  Pride and self-satisfaction and feeling superior to others gets in the way of love.  And Jesus wants us to come to the fullness of love.  And so, Jesus embarrasses us, deflates our pride, points out our prejudices, shows us our folly, and generally makes us uncomfortable.   Thank you Jesus!

That discomfort is part of knowing ourselves truly, and recognizing that we are loved, not because we are special, or better than anyone else, but simply because God loves us, every one of us.  That is what God does.  God loves. 

 

We become more like God, more true children of God, the more we love.  Love is what it is all about.  As St. Paul reminds us today: “So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

God bless!