Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
(C - cycle)  January  31,  2010

The scene in the synagogue at Nazareth turns ugly. At first the congregation is happy to honor Jesus, the hometown boy who made good. But then the negative in human nature begins to assert itself. “Isn’t he Joseph’s son?” The implication is: “Who does he think he is? He’s not a rabbi; he’s just a manual laborer from a line of manual laborers.”
 

Maybe it’s original sin, but there’s something in us---something we have to guard against---that resents one of our own rising above us. Familiarity breeds contempt. Sometimes parents continue to believe their children don’t know anything, long after the world respects them as wise. It can work the other way, of course. We’ve all heard that old chestnut, “My parents knew nothing when I was 17; when I reached 30, I was amazed at how much they had learned in 13 years.”
 

Women long have suffered from, as the saying goes, being put in their place. A friend of mine’s parents told her, “Girls don’t have to go to college. You get a nice job in an office and marry a nice fellow.” She obeyed, but her desire for learning made her discontented. Finally, she went back to school, while balancing her family obligations. Today she’s a judge. Another friend had to leave home at 17 because her parents forbade he to go to college. She worked her way through, graduated with honors and had a distinguished career as a state official.
 

Persons of color know all about the “who do you think you are” syndrome.. How much pressure and force have been exerted to keep them in their supposed place. A scene from a novel stayed with me. A black man who had gone away to college came back to his southern hometown in the 1950s. In an encounter with a white sheriff and his deputies, the black man said of a friend accused of a crime: “He doesn’t do that.” Immediately they fastened on one of his words. “Doesn’t, did you say doesn’t”” They wouldn’t let the conversation continue until he changed it to “He don’t do that.” Good grammar was a privilege not accorded to members of his race.
 

St. Paul in the second reading writes some of the most beautiful words ever written about love. “Love is paient, kind, always ready to excuse, to hope, to trust.” It’s hard to improve on St. Paul,, but we might add this: “Love rejoices at other persons’ growth.” May we never withhold recognition from those near to us who excel. The world has been enriched by persons who refused to let other define them as less that they really were. Think of Rosa Parks and Helen Keller, Mohandas Ghandi and St. Catherine of Siena. The greatest of them all was the man from Nazareth who had to leave town because he was too big for his small-minded neighbors.