4th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) - 30 January
30th January 2022
4th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year C) - 23 January
A reflection on today's gospel reading by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
"It was understandable that the people of Nazareth, who had seen Jesus grow up among them, were surprised to hear Him proclaim Himself the anointed of God, of whom Isaiah spoke. They now had a double alternative before them: either they could accept Him as the fulfilment of the prophecy; or they could rebel. The privilege of being the home town of the long-awaited Messiah and the One Whom the Heavenly Father in the Jordan proclaimed His Divine Son was too much for them, because of their familiarity with Him. They believed in God in a kind of way, but not the God Who touched their neighbourhood, entered into close dealings with them, and lifted hammers in the same trade shop. The same kind of snobbery that was found in the exclamation of Nathanael: 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' now became the prejudice against Him in His own city, and among His own people. He was indeed the Son of a carpenter, but also of the Carpenter Who made heaven and earth. Because God had taken upon Himself a human nature, and had been seen in the lowliness of a village artisan, He failed to win the respect of men.
"In order to bring home to their souls that their self-esteem was wounded, and that if His own received Him not, He would take His salvation elsewhere, He placed Himself in the category of Old Testament prophets, who themselves received no better treatment. He quoted two examples from the Old Testament. Both were a foreshadowing of the direction that His Gospel was to take, namely, to embrace the Gentiles...Since both [the widow of Zarephath and the leper Naaman] were Gentiles, He implied that the benefits and blessings of the Divine Kingdom were coming in answer to faith, not in answer to race.
"God, He told them, was no man’s debtor; His mercies would flow to other people if His own rejected them. His townsmen were reminded that it was their earthly-minded expectation of a political kingdom that withheld them from the realisation of the great truth that heaven had visited them in Himself. His own home town became the stage on which was trumpeted the salvation not of a blood, or a nation, but of the whole world. The people were filled with indignation, first of all because He had claimed to bring deliverance from sin in His capacity as the Holy Anointed of God; secondly because of the warning that salvation which was first of the Jews would, on rejection, pass into a mission to the Gentiles. They would cast Him out, for He had rejected them, and made Himself the Christ. Their violence was a preparation for His Cross. Nazareth lies in a cup of hills. A short distance from it to the southeast was a wall of rock about eighty feet high which drops about three hundred feet to the Plains of Esdraelon. It is there that tradition places the scene where they attempted to cast Him off. 'But He slipped through the crowd and walked away.' (Luke 4:30)
"The hour of His Crucifixion had not yet come." (Life of Christ)
Prayer which St. Thomas Aquinas was accustomed to recite every day before the image of Jesus Christ:
Grant me grace, O merciful God to desire ardently all that is pleasing to Thee, to examine it prudently, to acknowledge it truthfully and to accomplish it perfectly, for the praise and glory of Thy name. Amen. 🙏💖
(An indulgence of 300 days to all the faithful who, before studying or reading, shall, with at least contrite heart and devotion, recite this prayer - Pope Leo XIII., June 21, 1879)