Monday of the Third Week of Lent
Was Jesus always a trouble maker? Or was he always someone who swam against the tide? Remember the old adage, “Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” He liked to provoke and ruffle feathers. There are hints of that in today’s Gospel. His neighbors in Nazareth, who knew him from infancy, are ready to hurl him off a cliff!
Even though Nazareth is mentioned 29 times in the Gospels (I looked it up) the town itself was small and off the beaten track. Archaeologists estimate that there were around 50 dwellings at the time of Jesus. (Today Nazareth is the largest Arab town in northern Israel with 65,000 people). Isolated, people didn’t go through Nazareth to go someplace else. It seems to have been the butt of a joke, too. When Philip sought out Nathaniel to tell him, “We have found the messiah!” Nathaniel countered, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
The state of things in the first century Mediterranean world was that life was tenuous and short. Life expectancy averaged around age 35. One out of four women died in childbirth. Significant numbers of infants didn’t survive. Diseases like malaria, typhoid and dysentery lowered life spans. Some people did survive to old age but that was rare.
Teenage boys and girls were expected to marry and begin having children once they reached maturity. This was to secure the survival of the village, the town, the race. Those who refused to marry would have been thrown out of the village. (Did that happen to Jesus?)
There is certainly discontent regarding Jesus, as we hear today. This probably wasn’t the first time his neighbors wondered why he refused to do what was expected. He was a rule breaker. Why doesn't he just go with the flow? (Was it these very neighbors that Jesus had in mind when he said, “Love your neighbor as yourself?) The Nazarenes knew him best. He had been in their homes and he was in theirs. Everybody knew everybody else and everybody was in some way related to everybody else. Can you hear them say of the boy Jesus, “That boy ain’t right.”
Jesus of Nazareth knew disrespect, loneliness, and the plotting of connivers and disbelievers throughout the Gospels, even from those who claimed to love him. Most of the crowds who followed him turned away from him. We sometimes forget that.
Have you had such experiences yourself? It hurts a whole lot when those who know you best downgrade you, reject you. But God can turn sorrow and pain into something good. Jesus of Nazareth empathizes with us and responds to our rejections. He’s been there. As the Psalmist prays today, “Send forth your light and fidelity. They shall lead me on…”
Allow him to do just that.
—Timothy J. Cronin
*Illustration is an archaeological find in first century Nazareth that has markings of an ancient church, marking it as a very sacred site. Maybe the home of the Holy Family?