Year B: Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Grange Church

When advising about how to recruit people for new jobs and do interviews, recruitment agencies often remind their clients to be careful about the unconscious bias they can carry within them. Our brain is always working making quick judgements and assessments of other people or situations without us even realising. We form views, perspectives and ideas about other people that often suffer from unconscious bias on our part, a bias that can be influenced by our background, personal experiences, familiarity and the stereotypes that society proposes to us. These all combine to have an impact on our decisions and actions without us even realising.

The people of Nazareth weren’t recruiting that day when Jesus came back among them. They had heard about his success in neighbouring towns and villages. But they had known him for thirty years since he was a child. They thought they already knew everything about him. He was the local carpenter, the carpenter’s sons. His relations were living in the town. There was a sense of “who does he think he is?”. Without realising it, they boxed Jesus into small, narrow pigeon-holes of their mind and memory. They ended up missing out on who Jesus really was – the Son of God. As a result, he wasn’t able to perform miracles; he managed just a few healings. Without realising it, their bias, partly conscious, partly unconscious, blocked them from letting Jesus, the Son of God, act.

There’s a lesson here for all of us too. We are creatures of habit and we are used to a certain way of seeing things and assessing situations. It can be hard for us sometimes to open to what is new and allow ourselves to be open to the potential in others. We don’t make room for the something new that a family member or neighbour or work colleague is bringing us either by word or action.

But there’s another aspect to today’s Gospel that has something to say to us. The core of the problem for the people of Nazareth is that they could not accept what has been called the “scandal of the Incarnation”.  That God can be this one man, Jesus of Nazareth, in their small village, in a remote country, at a particular time in history was too scandalous for them. So they missed the God who was passing them by.

Here too there’s a message for us. We want to follow God. We look for him. But we could miss him if our heart is not open to finding him in the small, everyday events of our lives. Jesus comes to us in everyday circumstances. In the painful situation of a “thorn in the side” (possibly an illness or some other trouble) that he struggled with, Paul discovered God saying to him “my grace is sufficient for you; my power is made manifest in weakness”. Someone recently told me they witnessed someone giving a sandwich to a homeless man and it touched him greatly -  he felt it was seeing Jesus in action. It is good for us to notice the presence of Jesus in our lives. For that we need eyes of faith to be on the look out for him in the small, everyday ways of life.

I like the story of an American-Haiti man, Pierre Toussaint, who was declared Venerable by Pope John Paul.  He was a hairdresser in New York. There would be a lot to tell about his life, but one point is that in the course of his work, he would engage in good conversations with his clients. He would advise his customers. They would confide their cares and troubles to him. He counselled them to make the right decisions, entrusting problems to Christ and making all their decisions in the light of their faith. One woman commented, “Some of the most pleasant hours I pass are in conversation with Toussaint while he is dressing my hair.”

I give this example this because it can be a temptation for all of us to think God is far away, he doesn’t get himself involved in my life or situation. That would be to have a faith that is abstract, far from life, from problems, from society. The other temptation is to believe in a God of ‘special effects’ who does only big exceptional things and miracles now and then. The truth, however, is that Jesus passes us by every day. We might see people we know for years or think we know about them because we know some facts and figures about them. We might have our daily routine of our everyday tasks. But let’s not lose the opportunity to see and love Jesus, the Son of God, in each person we meet. We’ll be allowing him to speak to our hearts.