Today’s Gospel is a reminder: we Christians should not believe that we have all the answers, all the knowledge, all the illumination of God’s plan. In the well-known set of Carthusian books, a monk writes that, all we really can know is that we know nothing.
Yes, we may have Scripture and the great body of religious experience and writings of millennia. But, with knowledge comes the sense that we fully understand. And God cannot be fully understood.
Those who heard Jesus in his own town were shocked by his wisdom. But they did not link that wisdom to believing him. Instead, they rejected him because they thought he was a nobody. They had seen him grow up, and were not willing to accept his prophecy and teachings.
How we can be so similar! We do not trust the Christ that appears to us from within the hearts of those we live with, live alongside. We see only the person and our private representation of them, whilst not opening ourselves to the possibility that God lives within. Essentially, we do not trust.
On a wider scale, too, our world is one of mistrust. Some of us risk boiling down our religious experience to a Sunday morning out to see friends. Our identity as Christians is to trust, not to become comfortable inside a structure of repetition. If we think that we have a firm measure of what Christ wants of us, of what our faith is, then perhaps we are a little like those locals in today’s Gospel. If we think we know, then perhaps we are going the wrong way.
Let us always remain open to the will of God.
GOSPEL
The Lord be with you
And with your spirit.
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Mark 6:1-6
Glory to you, O Lord.
Jesus went to his home town and his disciples accompanied him. With the coming of the sabbath he began teaching in the synagogue and most of them were astonished when they heard him. They said,
‘Where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been granted him, and these miracles that are worked through him? This is the carpenter, surely, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joset and Jude and Simon? His sisters, too, are they not here with us?’
And they would not accept him.
And Jesus said to them,
‘A prophet is only despised in his own country among his own relations and in his own house’,
and he could work no miracle there, though he cured a few sick people by laying his hands on them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.
The Gospel of the Lord
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.