20 January 2018
Saturday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time
Some people think that God’s life is completely inaccessible to them, that the life that Jesus lives in this world is too far removed from their experience and the conditions of their life for there to have any relationship to them at all. This is not the case, if for no other reason than for the fact that Jesus died for their sins, not in the abstract, but in the flesh, and in relationship to the concreteness of their particular existence. But there are plenty of other reasons that we can add to this, some of them can be found in today’s short gospel passage (Mark 3:20-21).
Jesus did not grow up in some rarified, idealized utopia, but in Nazareth, a town whose reputation was such that Nathaniel declares, “can anything good come from Nazareth?” (Jn 1:46). Likewise, in today’s gospel, Jesus’ relatives, the people that he grew up with and around, do not seem to be very supportive of the life that he leads when he proclaims the good news. These relatives “set out to seize him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’” (Mk 3:21). If we face resistance from our surroundings and from our family when we set out to live the life that Jesus shares with us through the Holy Spirit, we should not think that we face obstacles that are unknown to our Lord. Indeed, Jesus grew up surrounded by such obstacles in Nazareth and from his own kin; he faces them down in a definitive way when he is tempted in the desert. So let us not think that we are so far from the Lord that we are incapable of living the life that he offers us. He has come down from heaven to earth, even to the very last place on earth, so that we might take his hand and begin to live, here and now, the life that leads us up to heaven with him.