14th Sunday Year B, July 7, 2012
Ez 2:2-5; Ps 123:1-2, 2, 3-4; 2 Cor 12:7-10; Mk 6:1-6
Easter in Ordinary
Reading today’s gospel reminded me of the title of a book written by a theologian names Nicolas Lash who was a visiting professor at Boston College
1 some years ago. The book was called Easter in Ordinary . Lash made a powerful case that the experience of God—which he summed up as the experience of the dramatic events connected with Easter—is not a rarefied experience that happens only to special people we call saints and mystics or only at special times like Easter liturgies or just on Sunday morning. No, the experience of the presence of God can be found right in the midst of ordinary life.
God’s nearness can be experienced by ordinary people like us.
Consider our gospel passage. Mark tells us that Jesus has returned to his native place, his home town of Nazareth, the familiar place where he grew up.
He comes there, though, not just as the local boy that all then neighbors were familiar with, but as a prophet. He comes proclaiming the nearness of God’s reign, telling his friends and neighbors that God is right in their midst: the kingdom of God—God—is among you. But for some reason, the Nazarenes have trouble accepting this message.
At one level the scene presents Jesus in all his humanness. It locates him within his natural family whose members it lists at some length. He is the local

carpenter and they know his relatives: He is Mary’s son and his relatives include James, and Joses and Simon. At another level, the questions asked by those who hear him teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath show that they
2 know he is displaying a wisdom and power mysteriously "given" to him from a source they cannot fathom. They ask: where did he get all this?
We, the readers of the Mark’s gospel, know the source of this wisdom and power. Mark’s first chapter tells us that it comes from Jesus being empowered, as Son of God, by the Spirit. We see the Nazarenes wrestling with the issue and ultimately being "scandalized" because, as their questions show, in their view he is no different from themselves. They seem to conclude that the presence of
God can’t come in the ordinary experiences of interaction with a young man they have known from childhood. Jesus is all too familiar to bring the reality of
God into their lives. They can’t believe this ordinary person Jesus is actually
God present among them. Thus Mark tells us Jesus was powerless to perform any "mighty work" among them because of this lack of faith.
The episode shows that the greatest enemy to faith can simply be "familiarity": a refusal to believe that God's presence—and prophetic agents of that presence—could come to us in a form as familiar as the person next door. The
Nazarenes had their own fixed ideas as to when and where and how the Messiah should come to Israel. The one they knew as the carpenter and as Mary's son

simply did not fill the bill. So the only place that really missed out on Jesus' works of power was his own home town.
Progress in the spiritual life—growth in the Spirit—almost always shows itself in the ability to recognize God more and more in the ordinary, the everyday.
Indeed, moving ahead toward becoming holy is growing in our readiness to see
God’s presence in the very midst of our daily lives. The great saints never ceased
3 being filled with wonder at the mysterious presence of God they constantly sensed all around them. The full meaning of the Incarnation is not only that the
Son of God became a human being, but that he took human form in a town as ordinary and insignificant and out of the way as Nazareth, in a man who was known to his neighbors as a simple carpenter.
The novelist and poet Reynolds Price puts it this way: stories of God like the one we have heard today draw us toward the singular claim at the burning heart of the whole bible –Your life is willed and watched with care by a god who once lived here. Here in all the ordinary events of family, work, friendship; but also the struggle, the illness, and the loss that are also ordinary in every life. These ordinary realities are the Nazareths of our lives. They are the place where Easter occurs—where we can truly meet God. The gospel invites us open our hearts and to trust that God is with us right here—in the midst of all that is ordinary.
David Hollenbach, S.J. St. Ignatius Church July 7, 2012