Journey's Weekly Homilies

Journey Catholic Community             
14th Sunday Ordinary Time              
7/6/03  Homily: Nancy
Ez.2:2-5
2Cor. 12:7-10,
Mark 6:1-6                     

Today another week is measured in what we call “Ordinary Time” in the Church Year.  It is supposedly the plan of the pastoral thinkers in our church that we have feasting times and some ordinary time in the passage of our year as church.  We celebrated Lent, Easter, Easter Season, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity and Corpus Christi…now it’s time to settle down and have some ordinary weeks, to know Jesus and the stories in some more ordinary way.  Surprise, surprise.  There’s nothing very ordinary about Jesus going home to his own town.  He is not acceptable there.  He has come back to his “native place,” which is Nazareth.  They say it’s a village with 150 people or less living there.  Everyone knows everyone, and they were all probably somehow kin to each other in some distant way.  Jesus preaches and teaches, and they are astonished at what he has to say.  But they cannot welcome it.  They cannot hear his message.  What he is saying to them goes far beyond his neighbors and kin’s understanding of who he was.  He was the carpenter, he was Mary’s son, by what authority could he walk in here and challenge their way of life?

I submit to us today a powerful truth:  Who we think Jesus is will determine our response to him.  How we name him creates in us either resistance or faith..  Who is the Jesus whom you follow?   Hold that question in your heart right now, and carry it home with you.  Your answer to that question can change everything about your life of faith, and therefore about your whole life.

This weekend, here in the United States, we are celebrating the successful rebellion against King George and the English domination of our country’s beginning.  There were rebels who desired to live free from what they experienced as tyranny.  Independence and freedom are so precious to the human heart, and yet we seem to always be searching for what independence and freedom really ARE, and what they look like!
So it was, also, for our ancestors in faith.  They lived in tyranny, but…they chose to grumble among themselves and ask, “Who is this Jesus?” They could not take that leap of faith to which they were being invited.  The Word of God was in their midst and they did not recognize him.

Ezekiel, in our first reading, gets a “stand-up call.”  He receives the word in the form of a scroll which he, metaphorically, is to EAT, as you read the surrounding verses.  He is to consume the Word of God and make it part of him in a profound way.  He becomes part of the word, and the scripture says, “It became sweet in his mouth.”  He is to prepare to go to the people of Israel, who are hard of heart, and have turned their faces from God.  Ezekiel is to go to them so that they will know that God’s invitation to them is still open.  God is offering them, just as to us, this delicious independence and freedom. God still want’s them to be God’s people.   They think they want independence from this God.  They are blinded to the immeasurable gift of this God, who fathoms their hearts, and knows them, better than they know themselves.

Ezekiel stands up, as he is called to do, and is a prophet rejected in the land of his own people.  And many, many, many generations later, there walks among these same people a man who is more than prophet, who also carries the Word within himself in a way we cannot explain.  He IS the Word.  But the crowd who has been listening to him can only accept him through his own family roots, it’s the only way they know him. And so he is a prophet rejected in his native place.  In ancient times, and in the 1st century, the people of God seem never to learn the lesson once and for all.  Here we are, so many, many hundreds of years later, still asking ourselves, “Who is this JESUS?”  

Today and the next two weeks, we will be reading from the 6th Chapter of Mark.  The stories summarize a lot of the struggle that was going on among the chosen people in that first century.  They were trying to decide who Jesus was, and they are our ancestors in this struggle.  They could not know independence and freedom from their Roman oppressors.  Jesus’ radical invitation to a new law, a law of love  ( not rules and sacrifices), was more than they could handle.  And here we are in our own times, STILL questioning the simplicity of his call to have faith.

I believe that Jesus still comes among us every day.  I believe that WE are his native place, now.  I know that no day goes by without some small moment of truth within it, some glimpse of the light of truth that I know exists for us.   I believe that every time we gather we hear the Word proclaimed, we hear the promise once again that the WORD will set us free.  That’s the promise.  And we reject it.

Why?  Is it possible that it IS, for us, because we do not yet know who Jesus is?  Who is this Jesus we say we are following?   How is it that we go on, essentially, saying “No” to the promise offered by our God?

I knew a man in my youth, whom I laughed about and judged to be the most stubborn person I had ever encountered.  He owned the small drug store on the corner of Meaghan Blvd. and the street where I turned toward home as I walked home from high school.  He was a man with little patience for high school pranks and shenanighans, and he had a memory for his grudges that lasted a long time.  A well-known set of three boys who were friends walked this same route home.  One of them was Gerald.  They were good boys, but they were mischievous and normal teenagers.  They had fooled around too many times in Mr. Terrells drug store.  One day Gerald was in there alone, and when he shook his milkshake too hard and shot cold milk and ice cream all over the counter and backdrop, Mr. Terrell kicked him out of the store, and told him NEVER to come in the store again.  Gerald tested it a week later, and Mr. Terrell shouted from the back, all the way across the store, “I told you…OUT.”

Twelve years passed.  In that time Gerald completed college and went to Seminary and was ordained a minister.  He was a pastor of a small church in a neighboring county.  Rev. Gerald was a grown man, and was visiting his elderly mother in the old neighborhood.  She asked him to stop by the drug store to pick up some medicine on his way to her house.  Gerald walked in to Mr. Terrells store, 30 years old, in a suit and tie, innocently on his errand.  From the back of the store, in the same loud, harsh voice, he heard, “I told you…OUT.”

All of these stories are about rejection, and about the call for acceptance.  Sisters and Brothers, if we fail to make room for the Word that comes to us, we also miss the freedom that comes with acceptance.  The invitation is to simply have faith, to trust in our God.  We learned again last week that it is our faith that heals us.  Rejection of Jesus, of this invitation, leads to small vision, narrow perspectives, and bitterness.  Acceptance of Jesus leads to eating the Word, “shouldering the Word in our flesh.”  Acceptance means rising above the thirsty ground we walk, naming Jesus, finally within ourselves, as the Messiah.  Acceptance leads to knowing our God is worthy of trust, and finding our true freedom, where love decides life and death.