Faith and Understanding (Monday, Week 22, Year II)

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We may want to raise few questions when we take a closer look at the gospel reading (cf. Luke 4:16-30): all spoke well of Jesus after his preaching in Nazareth, where he was brought up; towards the end of the reading, why did the same people rise up and put him out of the city even bringing him to the brow of the hill to throw him down? Why the commendation and sudden persecution? It seemed the only question that the people asked was: Is this not this Joseph’s son (carpenter’s son)? And what followed next was a barrage of words from Jesus accusing them of contempt and so on. 

What we should be worried about is the question which the people of Nazareth asked: why did they ask such question? We remember that Nazareth was a place where Jesus grew up and I am sure he was very much known by many people from Nazareth; they knew him and even his poor family background: a son of a poor carpenter. So, the question they asked was contemptuous: how can this poor carpenter be filled with so much wisdom to speak the way He did? And I am sure, as Jesus said in that passage, they might have begun to think of the many miracles Jesus performed at other places, expecting Him to do the same in his hometown? We see an expectation that did not spring from faith, but from a certain impure intention to weigh and then ridicule the power and capacity of the carpenter’s son.

You see, when God says that "His ways are not our ways, His thoughts not our thoughts" (cf. Isa. 55:8), we must take it to heart. When we try to understand every manifestation of God’s Spirit and power with mere human mind or categories of thought unaided by the light of faith, we will dismiss Jesus as the people of his hometown Nazareth did. As we strive to "understand" God and His ways, not everything will make sense to us. Our understanding of the things of God must be aided by faith, faith in the power of God, not in the wisdom of men. That is why St Paul was telling the Corinthians that all that he did and said when he was with them was done and said “in the demonstration of the Spirit and power, so that their faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4.5).  


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