Wednesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 325

When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands! 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in Man is not alone, A philosophy of being, 

"More significant than the fact of our awareness of the cosmic is our consciousness of having to be aware of it, as if there were an imperative, a compulsion to pay attention to that which lies beyond our grasp." 

In today's gospel we hear how Jesus, returning to his native place, met resistance from the very people who should have most warmly greeted him. After his baptism, the declamation from heaven, and his sojourn in the desert, Jesus had no further need to hide his identity. If he did not claim to be the Son of God, as the demons attested, neither did he need to mask his authority in good-old-boy-shucks. He had a mission to announce the Kingdom of God by word and deed, and little time to do it. 

The Galileans saw and recognized him but, because they recognized him as one of their own, refused to obey the imperative that Heschel describes. They resisted the compulsion to pay attention to something which lay beyond their grasp. 

But, despite his disappointment, the Lord could not be surprised at their rejection. As willing as we might be to see a glorious sunset or to hear the entrancing laughter of an infant, people don't want to stopped dead in their tracks. We might go to a museum to see the works of Van Gogh but we cannot sit there all afternoon in amazement at his Starry Night. It may be entertaining, delightful, or astonishing but few would want their lives turned inside out by a painting, a thunderstorm, or the coming of the Son of God. 

And yet our life as Christians begins in something wonderful. The forgiveness of sins feels like that, as do healing, welcome, and reassurance with their sense of relief and gratitude. We had long forgotten what it means to be alive and to hear him walking in the garden.  

This Galilean commands attention even from those who do not know where Galilee is. For he is more profoundly called a man of Earth, a creature of stardust, and one of us. 

I think that the eternal bliss of which Christians speak might be an ever growing willingness to be amazed and an ever deepening delight in knowing what Emmanuel means.