Homily

Jesus, as we heard last week, returns to his own in Nazareth, where he proclaims his first public address. He wants to make everyday life new, that life consumed by time, by judgments, by habits. After having heard Isaiah’s prophecy about the one who was to come to bring good news to the poor, liberty to captives and sight to the blind, he said, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." God’s dream begins today, not in an uncertain tomorrow: the word becomes reality, it is not one of so many speeches that we are used to repeating and hearing, one of so many words that end up becoming the same because none becomes real. Jesus is word and life. We too should join words to concrete choices, today, for the Gospel is good news for the poor, for all.
But what is the reaction to this so revolutionary a statement of Jesus? Joy? Enthusiasm? No. The inhabitants of Nazareth, his acquaintances, ask themselves, "Is this not Joseph’s son?" That is, "He’s one we know well! How can he make such a dream real?" Our temptation is to reduce the Gospel to everyday life. We think we already know; we trust our experience, so much so that we do not even think it is any use to listen. The people of Nazareth awaited the saviour, but they could not accept the fact that he would present himself in the likeness of a common man, moreover, one already known! Jesus is the son of Joseph, but he is also someone else. The people of Nazareth do not want to expand their heart to his universal sentiments. And how easily the heart contracts and becomes small and wretched! They are distrustful, ready to think badly. This is the problem of Nazareth: it remains old because it does not take the "today" of the Gospel seriously; it believes in things, but not in the spirit that can change things deep down. There is no hope in Nazareth! The prophet speaks, but no one takes him seriously.
His countrymen, in the end are right. And yet it is precisely this feeling right that quenches prophecy. Not by chance does Jesus recall the actions of Elijah the prophet, who during a severe famine in the land was sent alone to a poor widow near Sidon. After her initial fear, this poor woman received the prophet and offered him all that she had. Jesus recalls the episode of the prophet Elisha, too, sent to heal a foreigner from leprosy, Naaman the Syrian. The latter was not exactly a believer; rather, he was a foreigner with a haughty bent. Both he and the widow accepted the prophets and were helped. In them the need for help and healing prevailed, and they entrusted themselves to the words of the prophet; exactly the contrary to what the inhabitants of Nazareth did. In Nazareth Jesus does not find women in need like that widow or men in need of healing like that pagan Syrian. He is received with condescension, certainly with curiosity, in light of the fame that had spread about him, but there is no attitude of listening in need; there is no inner expectation that can change one’s own heart and life. They were looking for special emotions, while Jesus was asking for the conversion of the heart; they were expecting wonders and spectacles, and Jesus invited them to the daily toil of conversion. And the Nazarenes did not accept it.
Their incredulity, and maybe even ours, did not operate on a theoretical level, but was very concrete: they refused to let Jesus enter into their daily choices; they did not accept that his voice, in all of its similarities with our own, was above our voices. This incredulity impedes the Lord from working miracles. In the parallel passage in Mark’s Gospel it is bitterly remarked that Jesus could work no miracle in Nazareth because of their unbelief (Mk 6:8-9). Unbelief ties up God’s love, reduces to impotence his words, rendering them totally ineffective. In a way, it kills them. This is why unbelief becomes murderous. As the Nazarenes pushed Jesus out of their city and tried to kill him, so that he would not return among them claiming his authority, so do we every time we do not listen to the Gospel with a heart sincere and available, instead we cast it out of our life, out of human life. And we prolong that "way of the cross" which had its first stage in Nazareth and its culmination in Jerusalem.
Perhaps that day in Nazareth Jesus already experienced the reality of the same words that he would later say to his disciples: "Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account." This is the vocation of the prophet. The beginning of the book of Jeremiah reminds us of his unbelievable life marked by suffering, isolation and protestations. But the Lord comforts him, "They will fight against you; but they will not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the LORD, to deliver you" (Jer 1:19). The apostle shows us the human path which is best of all, the one to which we all should aspire: the way of love! Who is the greatest? He who loves, who makes others great because he loves them. We are all called to live love. To the sceptic, it seems naive; to the realist, an impossible dream; to the calculator, a loss; to the moderate, an excess. Only charity and love change the human heart and make real today the mystery of God’s will who wants us to be joyful and to lead our life to its fullness. And love will not end.