Goodness in Our Midst, Part II

July 5th, 2009
14th Sunday in Ordinary Time


He left that place and came to his home town, and his disciples followed him. 2 On the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence at him. 4Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ 5And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6And he was amazed at their unbelief.

Then he went about among the villages teaching.

In my last reflection I talked about how belief, no matter how great it is, cannot dictate to God what he should specifically be doing in any situation. He will do what is good. But, can we block God’s power and action in our lives through a lack of belief? Absolutely.

You may recall that I ended the last reflection with “Bonum est difusivum sui”, of which one translation is, “The good capable of spreading, spreads to those capable of receiving it.” If there is no openness to God moving and working in a person’s life and no willingness to believe, God will not force that person to receive his gift of goodness, the gift of himself. Lots of people have seen the power of the Lord at work and remain completely unmoved.

Think of a rock in water. Even though it is completely immersed in the water, the water does not soak into it and never softens it. When it comes out of the water, the water runs off of it and the rock is as hard and impenetrable as it was before. Now think of a sponge in water. The sponge may have been quite hard and brittle before it was plunged into the water but as the water soaks into it and permeates it, making it soft and pliable. It becomes like a vessel of that water, holding it and dripping it everywhere. Belief, then, is a quality that transforms us from hardness, brittleness and emptiness into a soft, saturated bearer of God’s goodness. We all know many people whom we would label as rocks, people who have hardened their hearts and refuse to allow God’s goodness to penetrate and soften them.

But, what about us? Can we not be dense rocks sometimes?

The moment we decide we know what God should be doing in any situation is the moment we begin to form a crusty rock like shell around us. The moment our limited perceptions dictate our expectations, we restrict our ability to soak up goodness or even recognize it.

The people in Jesus’ hometown thought they knew all about Jesus. They thought they knew who he was and what his real job was and how he should be leading his life. They could not see beyond that. Even though they recognized that he was expressing great wisdom and that he was capable of performing deeds of power, they just couldn’t get over their deeply ingrained ideas about what the Messiah should really look like, and Jesus, their next door neighbor, just wasn’t fitting into the expected pattern. To them two plus two should equal four and Jesus was a five. Jesus couldn’t saturate them with his goodness because they were solid and immoveable within their preconceived ideas.

Last week I had two grandsons visiting me. One is 14 months and the other 18 months. They are both at that stage where when their little minds decide they want something and it doesn’t immediately happen in the way they expect it to happen, they blow a fuse. They plop down on their little bottoms, refuse to move and they wail. I especially remember when the Moms said to both of them, “Do you want to go outside?” meaning that they were going to be taken in the car to go to the park. Both of these little guys assumed that their moms meant they could go outside on the deck, a favorite daily activity for them both. When their moms grabbed them away from the deck door and began to put shoes on them, you should have heard the screaming!

Going out, getting in the car and heading off to a park where there are swings and a slide and all sorts of other amazing things to discover and experience is infinitely more exciting and pleasurable than going out on the deck. However, these little guys had a certain idea in their heads and this idea, this perception, made them like little rocks. They weren’t remotely interested in finding out what was really going to happen. What a struggle it was to get them into socks and shoes and out the particular door they weren’t expecting to open up to them.

Do we ever get certain ideas about what should be happening and then flip out when it’s all turned upside down? Usually we assume that things are going wrong, get all rock hard and start to wail instead of saying, “Wait a minute. This isn’t what I was expecting but the Lord must have something infinitely more beautiful in store.” The moment we turn ourselves away from set preconceptions and open ourselves to God’s plan, we become sponges. Even better than that, we become adventurers into the kingdom of God’s goodness. We learn how to take risks, explore, discover and anticipate new and different horizons with him.

Like my grandsons, we need to learn to see that there are now, and will always be, many new doors through which we are called to venture. We need to take the risk of believing that God’s power and goodness is vaster and deeper than what we see in front of us.

Soak it in.